As a health coach, you can do a lot to help countless people improve their health and fitness through exercise, nutrition, and behavior change—but only as long as you actually reach people. And that’s why building a health and nutrition coaching website is one of the most important aspects of your budding business.
It’s vital for everything from acquiring and retaining clients to improving marketing and generating new leads. And as a health expert, knowing where to start could be difficult. You may not know a lot about building a website or implementing a digital marketing strategy, but don’t worry—we’ve created an in-depth, comprehensive guide for doing just that.
Read on, and we’ll help you create a website that can properly communicate your knowledge and unique message to your target audience.
How to Create a Health Coaching Website
The task of creating a website can seem daunting, so let’s start by simplifying your options. There are two initial choices you have when it comes to making a website:
- Do it yourself
- Pay a web developer/designer
That’s it. Your options are either putting in a bit more work to make the website yourself or paying more money to hire a professional web designer to do the job for you.
As you might assume, the process is a lot less hands-on if you decide to outsource it to a professional. But nevertheless, it’s useful to know exactly what goes into making a website, step-by-step. That’s why we’re going to explain the process of creating a website on your own.
Now, there are a lot of details to managing a health and nutrition coaching website, but most of them have to do with your own content. From a technical perspective, there are three things to take care of in the beginning:
- Website platform
- Website hosting
- Domain name
The first thing you need to choose is the platform that you’ll run the website on—essentially, its “software environment.” WordPress is one of the most commonly used options, and we’ll explain why in more detail below.
Next up, there’s the “hosting.” It’s, in literal terms, the place where your website “lives” on the Internet. Choosing your hosting provider means choosing the physical computers that your website will exist on, which are called “servers.”
And finally, there’s your domain—the digital “address” of your website that other people can type in to find it.
These three parts are necessary for a functional website, and we’ll go into more details about them right away.
Picking a Website Platform
A Google search will allow you to quickly see that WordPress is the most popular platform for something like a health and nutrition coaching website.
There are a couple of reasons for that, but they all stem from the same point: WordPress is the most widely used website building platform on the planet. These website builders are also referred to as “content management systems,” and WordPress is the absolute undisputed champion.
In fact, 43% of all active websites today were built on WordPress. And yes, we mean all the websites on the entire Internet. To put this in perspective, the next two contenders are Shopify and Wix, two niche website builders with less than 5% of total websites each.
To be more precise, all of this refers to WordPress.org. You may have come across WordPress.com as well; this isn’t the website-building software itself but a service that helps you build and host a website through the original WordPress.org platform.
Still, that clarification aside—why is the popularity of WordPress so important?
Firstly, it’s an open-source platform, meaning you’ll have no trouble finding tons of expert help on any snag you hit while creating your website. Secondly, there are countless companies creating all kinds of themes and plug-ins for WordPress—the former help you fine-tune the aesthetics of your website, and the latter allow you to have just about any kind of functionality you need.
Choosing Your Hosting Provider
As we’ve said, your web hosting is the physical embodiment of your website. Even though you’re the one that’s editing your website, posting content, and tinkering with it in WordPress all day long, the website doesn’t exist on your computer.
No home computer has the performance and security necessary to be a functional server. That’s why we have professional hosting providers with hundreds or thousands of secure and fast machines that can get the job done.
Again, Google is your friend here; there are countless hosting providers out there, such as GoDaddy, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. All of them provide services ranging from five bucks a month to hundreds of dollars.
Bear in mind that, while low-priced hosting may be a necessity in the beginning, you might want to consider switching to better hosting as you scale your health and nutrition coaching business. With more website visitors, cheap hosting usually means frequent crashing, downtime, lackluster security, and a meddling backup policy.
We recommend finding a decent managed hosting provider. These providers take care of the entire software and hardware setup and configuration, patch management, technical support, and system maintenance and updates.
For a health and nutrition coaching website, you probably don’t want to deal with any of this stuff on your own, so it’s best to outsource it to a hosting provider that will take care of all the technical details instead.
Choosing a Domain Name
Your domain name is the online address for your coaching business—which means you want to think long and hard about what domain you’ll buy. After all, it’s what all of your website visitors will remember you by.
So, for instance, seeing as our organization is called American Fitness Professionals and Associates, or AFPA, our domain name is afpafitness.com. If you’re not sure of what is the best domain name for your health coaching website, consider buying several domain names Except for the most generic ones, they’re largely inexpensive.
And that “.com” bit at the end is your top-level domain (TLD). As you may have noticed while surfing the Web, there are many different TLDs; some of the most popular ones are .org, .biz, and .com. Generally, .com is the most obvious choice, but it also tends to be the most expensive one.
Working on Your Design
So, you’ve brought together all of the basic building blocks of your website. Now that you’ve got all the technical stuff down, it’s time to focus on what your website is actually going to look like. At this point, it’s probably nothing to write home about—just a blank, generic website template.
In WordPress (and most other content management systems), the overall design of your website is called a “theme.” And the good news is there are tons of themes to choose from! But, in a way, that’s also the bad news—how are you supposed to know what the best look for your health and nutrition website is?
There’s no universal right answer here, as it depends on your personal taste, but it’s always a great idea to visit a couple of other health and nutrition blogs and websites you like. Try to break down what about their websites appeals to you, and then try to find themes that will bring the same elements to your website as well.
And if you really don’t want to mess around with this too much, you could always just find a great-looking health and nutrition website built on WordPress and use the same theme.
Also, keep in mind website accessibility to ensure that all of your potential users, including people with disabilities, are able to easily experience your site and access your information. This can include being aware of what colors you use on your website, adding alt text to images, and designing accessible contact forms, among other things.
Creating a Mailing List
Once you’ve got your website up and running, it’s time to spread awareness about it and attract people. And email marketing is an incredibly effective way to do it and a necessary element of any digital marketing campaign. Almost 65% of small businesses use email marketing—and you should consider it as well.
If you’re not sure what your target audience is, think about the specific health and wellness problems your website is helping people solve. Perhaps it’s addressing chronic fatigue, eating healthier, or maybe losing weight?
Regardless of which, write email newsletters that point people toward your specific area of health expertise and the content on your website. Encourage people to sign up for your newsletter by creating small tokens of appreciation—opt-in gifts, such as a detailed nutritional guide on a specific kind of diet or health-related topic.
Finding Great Images
The visual appearance of your website never stops being a fundamental selling point. A well-designed, professional-looking website contributes to the trustworthiness and authority of your brand, and conversely, a poorly executed website could lead people to question your knowledge and expertise.
At first, you can buy and use stock photos, but at some point, it might be worth investing in a professional photoshoot that will distinguish your brand from countless other health and nutrition websites.
Creating Content
In the long run, there’s only one thing that makes the difference between a successful and a failing website: informative, engaging, and original content—the blog posts, pages, words, and videos that you’ll fill your website with.
Proper content marketing is crucial, so here are some of the essential pages that any health and nutrition website should have:
- About Page: Where you’ll tell your target audience about your personal health and nutrition journey and the problems you can help them resolve.
- Services and Products: The pages that will present your products or services. If you’re selling something, make sure these pages are easily navigable to reduce people giving up at checkout.
- Contact Page: While you’re building your audience, it’s essential to make it easy for people to reach you.
- Blog: Where you’ll provide a steady stream of useful, relevant content for your visitors.
- Testimonials: The part of your website where you’ll prove your authority on the subjects of wellness and nutrition by sharing the positive reviews and experiences of previous clients.
At some point, you can hire other experienced health and nutrition experts to create content for your website as well. But in the beginning, you’ll probably start out by writing it yourself. And that’s not such a bad thing, seeing as it brings a personable quality to your website.
Final Touches
We’ll finish this guide off with a few more pieces of useful advice. First, make sure that you’ve got a vibrant social media presence—it’s the quickest way to build an online audience and lead people back to your website, and it’s also the best way to interact with your audience directly.
Apart from that, make sure to thoroughly test your website before you start working on your traffic. Test it from various computers as well as different browsers. And make sure to see whether it’s functional on tablets and phones as well.
Finally, there’s only one thing left to do: Go live! Tell everyone you can about the new website you’ve launched, share it with your social media pals, and leave links to it in your email signature. Don’t be shy; tell anyone and everyone about it. Creating a health and nutrition coaching website is a huge project, and you should make sure as many people see it as they can!
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