The DIY Squarespace trap every online coach falls into

Every online coach eventually decides they should probably have a real website. The Linktree is embarrassing, the agency quote is too expensive, and the sensible middle ground is Squarespace. You pay £15 a month, pick a template, and build the site on the weekend. How hard can it be.

Nine months later the site is still not live, and you have stopped mentioning it to your friends.

What actually happens

The first weekend is productive. You pick a template, you buy a domain, you drop in your logo, and you feel like a business owner. The homepage is almost done by Sunday night. You promise yourself you will finish it next weekend.

Next weekend arrives. You stare at the About page for 20 minutes and write nothing, because writing about yourself is the hardest thing a coach does. You close the laptop. You tell yourself you will write the copy in the week and come back on Sunday to drop it in.

In the week, you have seven client calls, two sales calls, a podcast to record, and a supplement brand wanting to send you free protein. The Squarespace tab stays closed.

This cycle repeats for nine months. The draft sits there. Every time you think about it, you feel a small wave of shame. Eventually you stop opening the tab at all, and the Linktree is still in your bio.

Why it fails

The Squarespace trap is not about Squarespace. The platform is fine. The trap is that DIY website projects fail at the copy stage, not the design stage, and a DIY platform does not help you with the copy stage at all.

You are not stuck because you cannot figure out how to centre a button. You are stuck because you do not know how to write an About page. And a template cannot write the About page for you.

The proof of this is simple. Look at every abandoned coaching Squarespace site on the internet. They almost all have the same problem. The template is 80 percent filled in, the layout looks fine, and every text box either contains the original template placeholder or one sad paragraph the coach wrote at 11pm and never came back to.

The hidden cost

The actual cost of a DIY Squarespace project is not the £15 a month. It is the nine months of unlaunched website, during which you keep losing enquiries to the Linktree, and the compounding psychological cost of having an unfinished project hanging over every week.

If a coach charges £200 a month for coaching and misses two clients a month for nine months because of the Linktree, that is £3,600 of lost revenue. The Squarespace subscription is £135 across the same period. The real cost of DIY is thirty times the platform cost.

The productised alternative

A productised offer fixes this by never putting you in the writing seat. The intake form extracts the language you already use with clients. The copy is drafted from those answers on day one. You never stare at a blank Squarespace About page, because the About page is already written by the time you see the site.

That is the actual value of the productised model. Not the price and not the speed, although both are nice. The actual value is that it removes the step that stops 80 percent of DIY projects from ever launching.

What to do with this

If you have a Squarespace draft that has been sitting there for more than three months, the honest move is to close the tab and stop pretending you are going to finish it. Either pay someone to finish it, or commit to one evening next week to ship the current version as-is. The half built draft is not a project anymore. It is a guilt tax.