We spend a lot of time looking at websites we didn’t build.

Not to judge. To learn what keeps working and what keeps not working. And after a while, you stop being surprised, because it’s almost always the same five things.

A career coach let us pull her site apart last month. She’d paid a designer, launched it six months ago, and knew something was off but couldn’t name it. We sat with it for twenty minutes and sent her a list. She fixed three things that afternoon. Two weeks later she messaged to say she’d booked more discovery calls in that stretch than in the previous two months.

We can’t prove the connection. She’s pretty sure.

Here’s the list, generalized enough to be useful, specific enough to actually check against your own site.

The headline says nothing.

“Welcome to your transformational journey” was the first thing on her homepage. It sounds nice. It communicates nothing. A headline has one job: tell the visitor what you do and whether it’s for them. “Career coaching for women leaving corporate” does that. “Welcome to your transformational journey” could be a candle brand.

This is the highest-value fix on any coaching website. You can change it in ten minutes and it will matter more than everything else on this list combined. Write it in the words your clients use when they tell a friend what you helped them do. Not your words. Theirs.

The About section is above the services.

Her story came before her offer. That’s backwards. Nobody cares who you are until they know you can help them. Lead with the problem you solve, then earn the right to talk about yourself.

Her About copy was actually good. Real, specific, not puffed up. It just needed to move down the page. Order isn’t decoration. It’s an argument, and the argument starts with the reader’s problem, not your credentials.

Six calls to action on one page.

Book a call. Join the newsletter. Download the free guide. Follow on Instagram. Listen to the podcast. Read the blog. Every one of those is a door, and when you open six doors at once, people stand in the hallway.

One primary action. For a coach with a booking calendar, that’s obvious: book the call. Everything else either gets a quieter text link or moves to a different page entirely. If you’re asking someone to do six things, you’re asking them to do nothing.

The testimonials are hiding.

Three strong ones, buried on a separate Testimonials page that nobody visits on purpose. The best one was a client describing how she landed a job offer two weeks after their final session. That line should be on the homepage, right next to the booking button, in the exact moment someone is deciding whether to click.

Social proof works when it interrupts doubt. A testimonials page is a trophy case. Nobody opens the trophy case before they’ve already decided to walk in.

The mobile version is an afterthought.

On her phone, the hero section was cut off mid-sentence, the booking button sat below two full scrolls of text, and the menu took three taps to find. More than half her visitors are on a phone. She didn’t know, because she’d built it on a laptop and never checked.

This one isn’t her fault. Most website builders default to desktop, and mobile is a toggle you have to remember to click. But a site that fumbles on mobile isn’t serving half its audience. It’s invisible to them.

What we wouldn’t change.

Her photos were hers, not stock. Her copy, once you found it, sounded like a person and not a template. She had a clear offer with a real price on it. The bones were solid, and bones matter more than most people realize, because structure is hard to add later and polish is cheap.

That’s the thing about most coaching websites. They don’t need a rebuild. They need an afternoon of rearranging, one honest look from someone who isn’t emotionally attached to the layout, and the willingness to kill a few darlings.

The uncomfortable part.

You’ve been checking your own site while reading this. That’s the point.

Every issue on this list shows up on roughly seven out of ten coaching websites we look at. The vague headline. The stacked CTAs. The testimonials nobody finds. The mobile afterthought. It’s not a talent problem. It’s a visibility problem: you can’t see your own site the way a stranger does, because you already know what it’s supposed to say.

The fix for most of it is editing, not rebuilding. Move things around, cut the extra buttons, put your strongest testimonial where it does actual work, and rewrite the headline in your client’s words instead of yours.

If you want to see what the “after” looks like for sites we’ve actually built, we keep a gallery.

Your site probably isn’t broken. It’s just wearing its good stuff in the wrong order.