Life coach websites are tricky to build, as life coaches usually help their clients in various areas of their lives.

That’s why life coach websites need to convey multiple benefits of the coaching services, establish authority for the coach, and build an emotional connection with the people visiting the site.

These websites also need to fulfill the general criteria of all high-performing websites:

• life coach websites need to load fast
• they need to make people stay on the website within 7 seconds
• their design needs to adapt to various screen sizes (responsive design)
• and most importantly, life coach websites need to generate leads

Most often life coaches also manage their coaching programs on their websites. They sell access to paid membership areas or courses, eBooks, or even run forums on their websites.

You see, choosing a theme isn’t that easy when you’re running a life coaching business (or any coaching business).

That’s why I want to share my experience in building websites with the OptimizePress theme.

Enter: The OptimizePress Theme

From a developer standpoint, I don’t like to work with the OptimizePress theme.

If you’re building the website yourself, though, you can’t go wrong with it.

Let me go through some features that make OptimizePress stand out amongst so many themes:

1. The Visual Editor

Most non-techy WordPress users struggle with building good looking themes because most themes simply don’t allow them to.

Many themes are limited with the layout options they have, and require coding skills if you want to change them. Click to tweet.

OptimizePress isn’t, it lets you build your personal layouts. It also comes with pre-defined templates you can easily customize with your texts and images.

The Visual Editor, therefore, lets you build the individual pages on your site and shows you exactly how they look like for your visitors.

There’s no switching between „Preview“ and „Editing“ mode, OptimizePress comes with its built-in editor that handles both at the same time.

2. The Pre-Designed Templates

If you are like most life coaches, you have no interest in learning about conversion optimization, WordPress, and all this tech stuff. You just want a good looking website up and running – and use it as a valuable asset in your business.

Here’s where the OptimizePress templates come into play.

Imagine these templates as pre-built page layouts you can use to build your „Home“ page, your „Services“ page, your „About“ page or basically any page on your website.

You can install these designs with the click of a button. All you need to do is to enter your texts and graphics, maybe adjust the coloring, and connect your email service provider.

There’s no need to build your own website design if you don’t want to. Using the templates, you can set up your website within 30-60 minutes – even without tech experience.

3. The Integrated Membership Plugin

OptimizePress comes with a plugin called OptimizeMember, which lets you integrate paid membership areas in your life coaching website.

You can use it to sell a training program, an online course, eBooks, or a forum for your clients.

Selling online courses is a common way for life coaches to monetize their websites, they often create courses based on the experiences of their one-on-one or group coaching programs.

And even if you do in-person coaching, you could use a password-protect membership area to give worksheets, video lessons or other training material to your clients.

OptimizeMember is a great add-on for a life coach website, and it’s perfectly integrated into OptimizePress.

When using other membership plugins like S2 Member or Wishlist Member (Wishlist is what I use for the WP Summit), you might experience incompatibilities with the theme. Not so with OptimizePress and OptimizeMember.

4. OptimizePress Also Is A Plugin

The thing with WordPress themes is that you can only have one running at a time. As they control the design of your website, you can only have one active theme.

Think of wearing a suit. You can’t wear two suits at the same time without looking stupid, right?

Well, a theme is a suit for your website.

The OptimizePress theme however also comes as a plugin, independent from the theme you have activated. And you can have as many plugins installed as you like.

Here’s the main benefit:

You can create stunning landing pages and sales pages with the OptimizePress plugin while your theme controls the design of the rest of your page.

Assume your life coach website has a blog, an About page, a Home page, a Services page, and a Contact page.

Now let’s say that you want to set up a stunning looking landing page for people to subscribe to your email newsletter, but your current theme doesn’t let you do that.

You could use the OptimizePress plugin to build that landing page without changing the design of the other pages and blog posts.

Activating OptimizePress as a theme would cause the design of all pages and blog posts to change, but activating OptimizePress as a plugin won’t.

Neat, huh?

What I Dislike About OptimizePress

There are some things I dislike about OptimizePress though, and I ranted about it in the past.

You know that I’m all about transparency, so I won’t hide these things from you.

Luckily, these negative things won’t affect you in daily usage of OptimizePress on your coaching website.

Being a WordPress developer and using OptimizePress in my WP Mastery Club „Done-For-You“ packages I found three things you should know:

• One of their past updates failed terribly. Within 24 hours, the OptimizePress team released four bug-fix updates to repair the broken sites of their customers. While this caused problems in the past, I doubt they’ll let it happen again.
• OptimizePress needs a reasonable web host if you have (really) long sales pages. I saw this issue in Bluehost’s cheapest plan; my recommended host Cloudways has no problems whatsoever.
• On a personal note: James Dyson agreed that I could interview him for my WP Summit (and I was super excited). However, he never followed up on that promise 🙁

Should You Use OptimizePress On Life Coach Websites?

The short answer is: absolutely.

I gave you the long answer above. For those of you who scroll through a post without reading it, here’s a brief recap:

Life coach websites need a professional website layout to establish authority and convey the benefits of coaching, yet life coaches shouldn’t have to be techy to build their website.

OptimizePress lets you easily create stunning looking sites using their pre-designed templates and their easy-to-use Live Editor.

You can see the design you’re building right in the editor, just as your visitors would see it.

It comes with a membership plugin that lets you sell online courses, eBooks or access to a mastermind forum. These are common ways to monetize life coach websites – and OptimizePress lets you use these features without any tech skills required.

Even though OptimizePress is a bit of a pain for a WordPress developer, I can highly recommend it if you’re not so techy and still want a professional website.

I use it for the „Done-for-You“ WordPress packages in the WP Mastery Club, and the coaches, authors & speakers love the websites I build for them.

So yes, you should definitely get OptimizePress if you’re a life coach!