You probably don’t want just anyone to sign up for your coaching or consulting services. If they’re not hiring a coach for the right reasons, not ready to put in the work, or don’t agree with your principles or approach, it’s not going to be worth your time or theirs to work together.
That’s one of the great things about having a high-quality website for your business. You can share information on your approach to coaching, your personal bio, testimonials from satisfied clients, as well as pricing. In doing so, you can weed out a lot of people who aren’t ready for what you offer. You’ll also give interested prospects an easy way to contact you or sign up.
There are various ways to get a site built for your business, though using a coaching WordPress theme is going to be your best option. Which one should you start from? That’s what we’ll explore in this post as we review three of the best WordPress themes for consultants and coaches.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Premium Coaching or Consulting WordPress Theme?
As a coach or consultant, the Internet can be a powerful business tool for you. The only problem is that there are many platforms that offer you a way to amplify your voice and presence. Is that really feasible though?
One of the best reasons to build your own website is to do away with all that noise that people encounter on Google, Facebook, and other digital channels. Sure, you’ll need those platforms for marketing down the line, but they can’t do for you what a website can.
For example, a well-built coaching website will be able to:
- Build your reputation as an expert or guru. Create content on a regular basis like podcast episodes, blog posts, and newsletters to show off your stuff.
- Generate qualified leads automatically. Once prospects see how awesome you are, your contact form, subscriber form, or appointment form is there, ready to be filled out.
- Create a passive income stream. In addition to selling coaching and consulting, your website will offer prospects and clients more value with new books, gear, and high-ticket sales funnel upgrades like courses.
- Grow a loyal base. Offer other opportunities to your prospects, clients, and followers to connect with you — on social media, at live events or retreats, and more.
There’s a lot of work required to make all this happen and it’s not going to happen overnight.
The good news is that a premium WordPress coaching theme can speed up how quickly you get that feature-packed website online. It can also ensure that you see a good return on your investment in a short amount of time.
3 of the Best Coaching WordPress Themes: Our Picks
People pay coaches or consultants like yourself the big bucks to guide and mentor them in areas like life, business, and wellness. But first you need a WordPress website that will help you attract, qualify, and convert your leads into clients.
Themes at a Glance:
Everlead - Life Coach and Speaker Theme
The best theme for converting prospects into paying clients.
Leadership – Coach Online Courses
The best theme for automated revenue generation.
MaxCoach - Online Courses, Personal Coaching & Education WP Theme
The best theme for selling valuable educational content.
Everlead - Life Coach and Speaker Theme
The Everlead WordPress theme can be used for all kinds of coaches. However, it’s ones who specialize in life coaching — like relationship coaches, health and wellness coaches, sobriety coaches, and mindset coaches — who will most appreciate the minimalist design and lead generation focus of its features.
If you’re looking for an attractive and effective life coach WordPress theme, this is a great one to check out:
Ease of Use
Everlead includes only one demo, but it’s built with mix-and-match pages and features. This will come in handy if you were hoping to find something that would enable you to piece together your website and offering without having to build much of it from-scratch.
If that sounds like you, you’re also going to like Everlead’s theme options:
For starters, it gives you control over the global design, layout, and style of your website — all from one panel. In addition, you can enable extra features, like subscription pop-ups and social sharing. You’ll also be able to configure custom settings for your portfolio, events, contact forms, and ecommerce.
Think of Everlead like a blank slate, but one that doesn’t force you to start from-scratch. Just as you do in your business, you’ll be the one to call the shots and make sure this website works for you.
Coaching Features
As a life coach, there are certain things you’re going to want and need your site to do for you. Everlead has accounted for most if not all of it.
Here are some of the more useful features you’ll encounter:
Business Management Features
As a coach, you have unique needs when it comes to managing your business. After you install this life coaching theme, you’ll be invited to install a collection of pre-packaged plugins and features:
In addition to including three premium plugins for free, you’ll also get plugins that add the following must-have features to your site:
- Appointment bookings
- Client testimonials
- Portfolios
- Memberships
- Social media feed integration
- Event calendars
- Ecommerce
Thanks to the theme developer’s foresight, you won’t have to spend extra time trying to find reliable WordPress plugins to help you build out these features.
Appointment Booking
This is a critical component of every coach’s business. You might use a website appointment calendar to book various session types:
- Free introductory
- Virtual
- In-person
- Group
- One-on-one
- Specialized events
You could use an external booking solution like Calendly or Acuity, but you might run into issues doing that. One way is if you direct prospects to the third-party website and then you disrupt the connection they had with you and your website. If they don’t book their appointment right then and there, they might not remember to.
Another issue you might experience is if you embed a third-party booking widget on your site. While you’ll keep the prospect right where they are, embedded widgets don’t always look and feel like the rest of the site, which can create undue friction for the user.
You won’t run into those problems with Everlead. An appointment calendar tool is included with the theme and lets you control what it looks like, how it works, and where it goes:
In addition to customizing the design, you can also set the rules and conditions for booking. This will create a more hands-off appointment booking process for you as your site only offers up dates and times based on when you want it to.
Events Calendar
While events might not be part of your business model right now, they may be some day. When you’re ready to start advertising your events, this plugin will enable you to add detailed calendars to your website:
You can use this feature to announce:
- Tour dates
- Conference appearances
- Book signings
- Free in-person coaching events
- Webinars
- And more
When you’re ready to take the next step in building relationships with your coaching audience, an events calendar will keep them up-to-date on your whereabouts.
Pros and Cons
The only con I can see with this life coaching theme is that the demo isn’t easy to find because it’s not in the places where you’d expect it to be. However, because you’re reading this, I’ll tell you right where it is so we can check that con off the list:
There is only one demo available from Everlead and you’ll find it when you go to Everlead Options and the Import tab. It’s going to take a few minutes to import the whole thing, but it’s worth the wait.
When it loads, you’ll not only have a comprehensive coaching site loaded into WordPress, but it’ll be chock full of examples and inspiration for:
Client testimonials:
Event listings:
There will even be a pending appointment notification:
This is neat because it’ll introduce you to how easy it’s going to be to manage your new coaching site.
Just keep in mind that having all of this demo content loaded into WordPress is a double-edged sword. While you’re going to have pages and features ready to go once you customize the images and copy, you’re going to have to delete any of the content you can’t repurpose for your own needs.
Leadership – Coach Online Courses
There are a number of reasons to like the Leadership WordPress theme. This well-made theme is responsive, fast loading, and looks classy. While this is important for trust-building, it’s also going to be helpful for sales generation — which is what this theme does extremely well.
If you’re looking for an attractive theme you can use to sell coaching courses, events, or digital products, then check this one out:
Ease of Use
You won’t have to deal with much of a learning curve when using the Leadership theme. After you install and activate the theme, everything else will quickly fall into place. You’ll be prompted to install the recommended plugins and then you can import the demo of your choosing:
Leadership does a great job of simplification. It starts with the four demos:
- Life
- Business
- Woman
- Health
Each demo more or less contains the same layout and features, so you won’t have to spend a lot of time previewing the demos to figure out which one has everything you need. Instead, what you need to determine is what kind of coach you want to be and which style best fits your own.
The simplification of the web design process continues with Leadership’s theme options. Unlike some other premium WordPress themes, there isn’t a separate area in WordPress for this. It’s all contained under Theme and Appearance:
Not only will this help you design and style your site more quickly, it also keeps the website’s loading times fast. Speed is critical when your primary website goal is sales.
Coaching Features
However you choose to use Leadership — as a business coach WordPress theme, fitness coach WordPress theme, or life coach WordPress theme — you’ll be happy that you did as it’s built for conversions and success.
Elevated Design
Every coaching entrepreneur has someone they emulate. Marie Forleo. Gary Vaynerchuk. Tony Robbins. When I look at the elegant design and layout of this WordPress theme, I envision that someone on their level would be behind a site like this.
Having a beautiful website isn’t just useful for impressing prospective clients. Consumers generally perceive attractive websites to be easier to use than ones that aren’t. This perception — along with the intuitive design of each page — will help visitors effortlessly get through your content and offerings. Less friction will translate into more sales.
Sales Integration
There are different ways to do coaching. This WordPress theme is meant for the coach that wants to automate and scale their offering.
The main feature in Leadership is the LearnPress plugin, which enables coaches to create courses:
This plugin combined with the placeholder course content included in the demo will make it easy for you to get your coaching program off the ground:
LearnPress isn’t the only part of the site that will help you scale your revenue earnings. Each demo includes an area for you to sell personal development products (like ebooks or videos) and to sell tickets to events.
Lightweight Build
It’s clear that the developers behind this theme really thought through its optimization. For starters, the demos include only one of each page. By not weighing the demo down with unnecessary content in the first place, this theme is already pretty lightweight.
What’s more, while the design is visually compelling — with imagery accompanying every page and item for sale — it doesn’t overdo it. Images and videos can slow down a web page, so this was a smart choice on the developer’s part.
Realistically, you could make this theme load even faster by not activating plugins you won’t be using:
There aren’t many plugins that are absolutely required for this theme to work, so spend some time reviewing your plugins after you’ve finished customizing the site. You may find there are some you can delete when all is said and done.
Pros and Cons
There’s perhaps one con about this theme. There isn’t much diversity in terms of design since each demo uses a similar layout and content structure. While the design is beautiful and feature-rich, this could mean you’ll have to do more custom design work than you’d have to with other coaching themes.
That said, Leadership comes with the Elementor plugin. This visual page builder plugin isn’t just easy to use regardless of your WordPress skill level. It also comes with dozens of templates for pages and sections. So it’s not the end of the world if you decide you want to keep Leadership’s features but take the design in a different direction.
Speaking of features, this theme is the perfect option if you want to create a pathway to automated revenue generation. It comes with all the tools you need to sell pre-recorded courses, event tickets, and digital products. By empowering your site to manage sales for you, you can focus on providing coaching services to clients that need it.
MaxCoach - Online Courses, Personal Coaching & Education WP Theme
MaxCoach is a beautiful, professionally built WordPress theme for coaches, tutors, entrepreneurs, and educators of all ilks. Even if you can’t find a home page template designed specifically for your niche, they’re so easy to customize that it won’t matter much.
Whether you want to sell one-on-one or group sessions, pre-recorded courses, or other educational content, this theme comes with all the tools you’ll need.
Ease of Use
MaxCoach is easy to use if you know the right way to approach it. Specifically, after you activate the theme and add your license info, it’s best not to rush into installing every required and recommended plugin.
Instead, when you see the notification for it, go to the plugins list and install only the ones you need:
- Insight Core
- Elementor
- Elementor Pro
- Taxonomy Thumbnail
You'll eventually need to install some of these other plugins. However, it’s best to figure out what you need first.
You’ll know what that is once you install your demo and get to work on customizing your site. You’ll find three MaxCoach demos under Insight Core and Import:
The Main one is the one you’ll want if you’re building an LTR (left-to-right language) website. Use RTL if your website uses a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew.
The importer only takes a few minutes to load. Once it’s in there, customizing the site is easy thanks to MaxCoach’s Customizer settings as well as the Elementor page builder it integrates with.
Coaching Features
MaxCoach is built for a variety of educators. Because of this, its strength lies in how much power is packed into a single theme.
Impressive-looking Page Templates
First of all, this is an impressive theme. In addition to looking attractive on its face, each page is built with some sort of interaction or motion, which is useful for engaging prospective students or clients.
Secondly, the demo includes 18+ home page templates for a wide variety of niches like:
- Yoga
- Gym
- Dance
- Guitar
- Photography
- Personal finance
- Cooking
- Distance learning
You’ll also find general purpose home page templates for business coaching, life coaching (motivation), and online course programs. The imagery and copy can easily be interchanged with your own, so repurposing these pages for a niche that doesn’t neatly fall into one of these categories is easy to do.
In addition, MaxCoach comes with over 50 pre-defined internal pages. This will enable you to pick and choose which versions of key pages — like About, Contact, and Blog — you like best.
Intuitive Website Editing
Whether you end up building a large coaching website or a smaller one, you’ll have an easy time editing it. This will come in handy down the road, too, when you inevitably add more content or services to it.
For starters, MaxCoach includes intuitive Customizer settings:
The Customizer is well-organized and will make it easy to configure the global styles and layouts for your site. Paired with Elementor Pro, you’ll have no issue updating your pages:
Because many of the pages come with engaging content built in, you shouldn’t have to spend much time trying to get the most out of your editing tools either. The theme developer already did a lot of it for you.
Educational Tools
MaxCoach’s recommended list of plugins includes the best of the best when it comes to setting up coaching or education programs on a website:
- LearnPress
- Paid Memberships Pro
- WooCommerce
- Video Conferencing with Zoom
- WP Events Manager
You can sell books and other personal development products through a Shop:
You could also sell courses:
What’s more, this theme includes a Features section with templates for events. So if you want to announce upcoming events or sell tickets, you won’t have to build those pages from-scratch either:
Once you’ve nailed down what kind of programs, products, or services you’re going to sell, all you have to do is install and configure the compatible plugin for your site. The developer has thought of it all so you can focus on creating content, connecting with prospects, and then providing your solutions to them.
Pros and Cons
MaxCoach is a well-thought-out WordPress theme for coaches, tutors, and course creators. In addition to providing you with a solid framework of pre-designed pages to start with, the theme is attractive and engaging.
The biggest con I see is that it can be a tricky one to use if you’re not aware of how much extra stuff comes in it.
For instance, I originally installed all of the required and recommended plugins at once. After I did that, it took over 10 seconds for every page in WordPress (and on the frontend of the site) to open. What’s more, the demo installer kept stalling on me.
However, if you know that the recommended plugins should be added after the fact and only as needed, you shouldn’t run into those kinds of performance issues.
Keep in mind that it’s not just an excess of plugins that can slow you down with this theme. The demo comes with a lot of pages that you won’t need as well as a mega menu preloaded with most of them:
Chances are good that you won’t need a mega menu. Instead, what you’ll need to do is comb through the preloaded WordPress pages and remove the:
- Homes pages you don’t need.
- The alternative internal page designs you won’t be using.
- The learning management pages that are irrelevant to what you’re selling.
While it will take some time to clean out the excess demo content and to set up the plugins you do need, it’ll be worth it in the end. This is a great looking theme that’s going to help your coaching business or educational program make a strong first impression.
Which WordPress Theme is Right For Your Coaching or Consulting Business?
Although you might run into free WordPress coaching themes that look just as good as the ones above, remember that there’s usually a trade-off. Premium WordPress themes for coaches and consultants come with far greater value baked in.
In some cases, you get access to premium plugins that you’d otherwise have to pay for. In other cases, all the features and functionality you’d need to sell your solutions are already built in. Premium themes might come with an upfront price tag, but you’ll get a much greater ROI from them in the long run.
As for which of these three coaching WordPress themes to use, it depends on what you plan to do with them:
- Everlead is the best option if you need a site to attract prospective clients, educate them on your coaching or consulting services, AND convert them — i.e. book appointments, sell goods, sign up blog subscribers, and boost event attendee numbers.
- Leadership is the best option for automated revenue generation — i.e. sell high-ticket coaching programs, event tickets, and personal development products. If your goal is to infinitely scale your offering, this is the way to do it.
- MaxCoach is the best option for selling premade education-focused programs and products to get people in the door. If your goal is to build your reputation as a coach, mentor, or educator, having a website that provides prospects with a ton of value upfront is a great way to do it.
Ready to get the word out about your coaching services and possibly scale your offering with a website that works on your behalf? Start with one of these premium coaching WordPress themes today.
In-depth WordPress Theme Reviews
At Tuts+ we like to give website owners as much information as possible. If you’re looking for more detail than you’ll find in a long list of themes, we have a selection of review posts you might be interested:
3 Delicious WordPress Restaurant Themes: A Close Look
3 Awesome WordPress Themes for Podcasts and Radio Stations: Tested
3 Simple, Minimalist WordPress Themes: Compared
3 Best WordPress Portfolio Themes: Tested
3 Top WordPress Magazine Themes for 2022: Tried and Tested
3 Delicious Food Blog Themes for WordPress: Tested for You
3 WordPress Themes for Writers and Authors: Reviewed
