How [& When] to Make a Custom Coaching Website?

As an experienced coach, you likely have a simple WordPress- or Shopify-based website to present yourself and your services. However, such a solution may not match your coaching business needs as you decide to launch a new product or deepen the level of interaction with your clients.

When using a templated website, you probably won’t be able to implement all the features you need due to the limitations of basic WordPress-like builders. Сustom website development allows you to overcome these obstacles and create a product that perfectly addresses the needs of your customers.

In this article, we will take a closer look at how to create a custom coaching website, when you really need this and share some development tips.

✅ When to Create a Custom Professional Coaching Website

A custom coaching website is much more flexible in terms of available features and design. However, it’s not a silver bullet that solves all the challenges – in some cases, it may be more than enough to have a good old templated website.

In this section, we’d like to describe a few common cases regarding when it’s reasonable to consider custom coaching website creation and when a templated solution may be enough for your goals.

You’re looking for custom website design and functionality

You may come to the point when your current website builder can’t provide you with the required customization level. That usually happens when:

• you’re launching a new product that implies interaction with users — online video or audio courses, live training sessions, interactive tools for self-assessment, etc.;
• you have some ideas on how to update your existing product, however, they can’t be implemented with your current website builder;
• there is no way to implement some web design decisions you want using your current website builder.

As you can see, a custom professional coaching website is often about interactivity. Watching videos, listening to audios, leaving comments, joining calls, sending documents and files, communicating in chats, doing tests and tasks — the more of these and other similar interactions you want to have, the higher the chances are that you need a custom coaching website.

You need special website integrations

If you have some experience working with any WordPress-type websites you probably know the variety of plugins available on these platforms for you to pick from. While they usually cover many popular 3rd-party services, it may not be enough if you need to integrate special coaching tools. Apart from this, even if there is an available plugin, its performance may not be as good as the one you have when using the service itself.

It was reported that by 2021 the average human’s attention span has shortened to 8 seconds. Thus, it’s important to get users through the sign-up stage as quickly as possible so they don’t waste focus on something nonessential for them.

📑 Content Libraries

In case you are planning to sell courses on your website you need to present them all in one place. Thus, your customers will be granted easy access to what you are offering.

We suggest you consider creating a separate page where every course and the product you are selling will be displayed. There, you can display the full picture of what you are going to teach your clients. You can include:

• The course title & description
• The number of lessons and/or course length
• The format: live online lessons, pre-recorded videos, etc.
• The cost of the course
• A short presentation of the course

All of this and other similar information will help your customers understand the value of your services and motivate them to purchase whatever course(s) you are offering.

🔍 Filtering and Sorting

It is crucial that among all the listed web courses and products on your website your visitors could find exactly what they are looking for in a nick of time.

For this purpose, you should consider implementing search bars and filters in your content libraries. You can provide your users with various options to sort your offers such as:

• Sort by Relevance
• Sort by Popularity
• Sort by Rating/Feedback
• Sort by Release Date
• Sort by Price
• Sort by Start Date

📇 Student/Coach profiles

To significantly simplify coaching and learning sessions for both sides, present a student/coach dashboard in the personal cabinet of your website. It will grant you, as a coach, access to the following features making your interaction easier:

• Interactive schedule and calendar
• Upcoming sessions reminder
• Information about your latest students
• Access to the feedback your students wrote regarding the course
• Possibility to leave feedback regarding your students’ results

🛠️ Special Features

Here are some special features that you may use to provide your service online.

📷 Video Conferences

It will be much more convenient to implement your own video call platform so you don't have to deal with a lot of unnecessary information.

Your own platform will let you forget about constant room creation and managing different connection links when you need to have a quick call with your client.

Also, it will give you opportunities to create any feature you may need that not every conference platform may provide. The ones you may be interested in include:

• Breakout rooms
• An interactive blackboard
• Unlimited recording
• Screen sharing

🔊 Video/Audio player

When it comes to providing professional guides and courses, it is more convincing and significantly easier to absorb information with audio and video materials. For you to use these contents properly, your platform has to have a good player with basic essential features:

• 5-10 seconds rewind back and forth
• Subtitles
• Volume master
• Video speed management (0.25x, 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, ...)
• Continuing any lecture from the moment you stopped at last time

📌 File Uploading

A file-uploading feature is a necessity for making your coach-student interactions more convenient. For example, it’s a must-have if your coaching business supposes an interaction with your customer by any of these scenarios:

• students share files so you can track their progress;
• you provide some additional information for students’ assignments;
• you provide any extra content during live sessions.

🧩 Quizzes and Tests

In our time, tests and quizzes are some of the most common ways for a coach or tutor to understand:

• The level of students' knowledge in any topic
• The amount of information absorbed after taking a course
• Students’ weak spots that are usually discovered during the learning stage
• The techniques that work the best/the worst

While quizzes and tests remain one of the most efficient methods to grant you, as a coach, access to direct feedback from your students, we recommend you to not overlook adding these features to your website.

📆 Easy access to the coach's schedule and booking

Talking about the stage where your website visitor is already interested in what you offer, you should grant them interactive access to your full schedule along with a contact form. This can be presented as a calendar with available dates for consultations and the possibility for users to book a free spot.

🔗 API integrations

Making an API integration means creating a connection between several applications using their application programming interfaces (APIs) to grant them the ability of mutual data exchange.

Nowadays, API integration is a necessity for making your website multifunctional, however, you won’t be able to integrate every feature you want. The main limitation in this kind of integration is that, unfortunately, not every company makes their APIs free or even just available for everyone.