The 25 things every coaching website should check

Most coaching websites fail quietly. They look fine. The logo is in the corner, the hero image is decent, there is a booking button somewhere. And they still lose 80 percent of the visitors they could be converting, because they are failing on a handful of specific things that nobody has ever pointed out to them.

This article is the full list. Twenty five things a coaching website should get right, grouped into five categories. Each one is something a cold buyer will notice in the first 15 seconds, consciously or not, and each one is something you can fix in an afternoon.

You can work through the list by hand with the help of a blank Google Doc and a critical eye. Or you can paste your URL into the free audit tool and let it score all 25 in about 60 seconds. Both work. The tool is faster. Your eyes catch things the tool cannot. Ideally you do both.

The five categories, and why they matter

A coaching website has five jobs, in this order.

1. Copy. Tell the visitor what they will get, who it is for, and how long it takes.
2. Trust. Give them reasons to believe you can deliver.
3. Speed. Load fast enough that they do not bounce before the page shows up.
4. Mobile. Render correctly on a phone, which is where 75 percent of coaching traffic lands.
5. SEO. Be findable by search engines, so you stop depending on Instagram.

If the site fails at Copy, nothing else matters. If the site nails Copy but fails at Trust, the buyer does not believe you. If you nail both but the site takes 8 seconds to load on mobile, the buyer is gone before they read a word. Each category is necessary. None of them is sufficient on its own.

Here are the 25 checks.

Copy. Is the page making its case?

1. The headline names a timeframe

"Lose the weight" is not a promise. "Lose the weight in 12 weeks" is. A timeframe, even a rough one, turns an abstract aspiration into something a buyer can picture. If your H1 has no clock, rewrite it.

2. The headline uses an outcome verb

Greeting-style headlines like "Hi, I am Sarah" do not convert because the subject of the sentence is the coach, not the client. Your headline should open with what the client does or gets. Lose. Build. Gain. Transform. Fix. Reach. Unlock.

3. The headline names the client

"Fat loss coaching" could be for anyone. "Fat loss coaching for women over 40 who have tried everything" could only be for one specific person. The second one converts better because it lets the wrong fit self-select out, and it makes the right fit feel seen.

4. A services or offer page exists

If you have a coaching business, you have an offer. The offer deserves its own page. Not a section on the homepage. Not a line in the about page. A page called /services or /coaching or /work-with-me, linked from the main nav, explaining what the buyer is actually buying.

5. An about page exists and is linked

The about page is where trust gets built. Not with your diet story, with a clear argument about the client problem and how you work differently. If there is no about page, the buyer has nowhere to vet you, and they default to not trusting.

Trust. Does the buyer have reasons to believe?

6. Testimonials or reviews are visible on the homepage

A visitor who has never met you needs proof you can deliver. The strongest proof is a real client with a real name and a real situation. The weakest proof is a row of five-star rating icons with no attribution. Show the real ones. Screenshots of DMs work too.

7. Social proof numbers are present

"I have worked with over 140 women in their thirties balancing full-time jobs and two kids" is specific and convincing. "I am passionate about helping you reach your goals" is not. Numbers beat adjectives. If you have worked with 30 clients, say 30. If you have been coaching for four years, say four.

8. Contact information is visible

A surprising number of coaching sites have no visible contact method beyond a booking calendar. Some buyers only enquire when they can see a human email address or phone number. Putting one in the footer costs you nothing and earns a small but real amount of trust.

9. The about page is linked from the homepage

Earlier we said the about page should exist. This check goes further. It has to be reachable from the main nav or a prominent section of the homepage. If it exists but is buried, it might as well not exist.

10. Social platform links are present

Even if Instagram is not "your business", an Instagram link in the footer tells a buyer there is a human on the other end of this website. Most buyers will not click it, but they will feel better knowing they could. Same for YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever you are most active on.

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Want this automated? Paste your URL into the free audit tool and you will get every check in this list scored in about 60 seconds, with a specific fix for every fail.

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Speed. Is the page loading fast enough?

Speed is boring. Speed is also where 30 percent of mobile visitors give up, especially on older phones. The metrics below come from Google Lighthouse, which is what Google itself uses to decide how your page ranks. If you are not passing these, your SEO is fighting uphill no matter how good your copy is.

11. Lighthouse performance score is 90 or higher

One number that summarises everything else. Anything under 50 is broken. 50 to 89 is mediocre. 90 to 100 is good. A coaching website with no video, no heavy animation, and sensible images should be 95 or higher.

12. Largest Contentful Paint is under 2.5 seconds

LCP measures how long the main content takes to appear. On mobile, on a typical connection, it should be under 2.5 seconds. Over 4 seconds is a fail. The most common cause is an uncompressed hero image.

13. Cumulative Layout Shift is under 0.1

CLS measures how much the page jumps around during load. If your buttons move after the page looks loaded, that is CLS. It is annoying and it costs you clicks. Fix it by giving images explicit width and height and reserving space for embeds.

14. Total Blocking Time is under 200 milliseconds

TBT measures how long the main thread is blocked during load. Mostly this is third-party JavaScript. Heavy analytics scripts, chat widgets, and marketing pixels all add TBT. Audit your third-party scripts, remove anything you are not actively using, and defer the rest.

15. First Contentful Paint is under 1.8 seconds

FCP is the moment the first pixel of real content shows up. It sets the expectation for the rest of the load. Under 1.8 seconds feels fast. Over 3 seconds feels broken. Most commonly fixed by preconnecting to font hosts and inlining critical CSS.

Mobile. Does it work on a phone?

Your coaching business runs on Instagram. Instagram runs on phones. At least 75 percent of the people who land on your site are on a mobile device. If the site is not built mobile-first, you are building for an audience that is not there.

16. The viewport meta tag is present

This is the single line of code that tells a mobile browser to render the page at the correct width. Without it, the site renders as a desktop page shrunk to phone size, with tiny unreadable text. If this is missing, nothing else on this list matters.

17. Content fits the viewport

A correctly built mobile page has no horizontal scroll. The moment a visitor has to swipe sideways to read something, they bounce. This is almost always caused by a wide element with a fixed pixel width. Fix by setting max-width on images and wide containers.

18. Tap targets are large enough

Buttons, links, and form controls need to be at least 48 by 48 pixels with 8 pixels of spacing between them, or visitors will miss taps and give up. This is specific enough that Lighthouse audits it directly.

19. Text is legible on mobile

Body copy smaller than 16 pixels is effectively unreadable on a phone. The fix is to set body font-size to 16 pixels or larger. This one sentence fix improves the "this site was built by someone who cares" feeling more than any design work.

20. Navigation is mobile friendly

Eight links in a mobile drawer is a tap puzzle. Five or six is comfortable. If your main nav has more than six items, push the rest into the footer. Mobile nav is not the place to list every page on the site.

SEO. Can Google find and rank the page?

The simplest rule of SEO for small coaching businesses: if your site passes the technical basics, Google will rank you for what your copy says you are. If you fail the technical basics, no amount of good copy can compensate.

21. The page has a title tag

The title tag is the single most important SEO signal on the page. It is what shows up in Google search results as the clickable blue heading. If you do not have one, or if it just says "Home", Google has no idea what the page is about. Aim for 50 to 60 characters.

22. The page has a meta description

The meta description is the grey snippet under the title in search results. It does not directly affect ranking, but it affects click-through rate, which does affect ranking indirectly. Aim for 140 to 160 characters that restate the offer.

23. The page has exactly one H1

H1 is the main heading. It should match the topic of the page. One per page. Not zero, not five. The audit tool flags pages that are missing an H1 entirely, which is surprisingly common on template sites that use background images for the visual hero.

24. A canonical link is declared

The canonical link tells Google which URL is the definitive version of a page. If your homepage is reachable at example.com, example.com/, example.com/?ref=instagram, and www.example.com, a canonical link tells Google they are all the same page. Without one, Google sometimes treats them as separate pages and dilutes your ranking across all of them.

25. sitemap.xml is reachable

A sitemap is a file at /sitemap.xml that lists every indexable page on your site. Google finds new pages faster when you publish one and submit it to Search Console. Most modern site builders generate it automatically. If yours does not, it is one small file away from being fixed.

What to do with the results

Run through this list on your own homepage. For every item, give it a pass, a warn, or a fail. Tally them up.

• Zero to five fails. Your site is solid. Fix the fails you found, then focus on improving conversion, not technical basics.
• Six to twelve fails. Your site is leaking leads at the basics. A structured rebuild would fix most of them in a week. The gap between where you are and where you could be is costing you real enquiries every month.
• Thirteen or more fails. The site is not yet doing the job you need it to do. Every coach in this bracket is one serious rebuild away from doubling their enquiry rate without changing the offer at all.

If you want the honest version in a minute, paste your URL into the free audit tool and it will run all 25 of these checks automatically, return a scored report, and tell you which three fixes would have the biggest impact.

The thing the checklist does not cover

These 25 items are structural. They are things that either exist or do not, and can be graded objectively. None of them tell you whether your offer is compelling, whether your copy sounds like you, whether your niche is sharp enough, or whether your pricing makes sense. Those questions need a human.

A coaching website that passes all 25 checks but sells a weak offer will not convert. A coaching website that fails half these checks but has a genuinely differentiated offer and testimonials from 20 happy clients will still convert. This list is necessary, not sufficient.

Start with the 25. Fix the fails. Then get back to the harder work of sharpening what you sell.