Do you have a website? Congrats, that’s an amazing accomplishment already! (If you don’t have a website yet, check out this post on how to get started). But maybe you’re wondering sometimes – could your website perform better? Why are so few people signing up for your workshops or retreats through the site? I’ve done a ton of yoga teacher website reviews over the last year and there are three things that popped up over and over again. Start learning from the mistakes of others and make sure you don’t duplicate these three very common blunders on your yoga website.

Mistake 1: Too Much Clutter

Less is more with your website. It’s been proven that when you give people too many options, they’ll feel overwhelmed and not choose anything.

A good website should make the experience for your users (= your website visitors) effortless. To do this, you want only the most important information to be presented on your pages. I want you to go through your website to determine what’s the best need to know information that will convince your audience to stick around for more, so they can take the next step that you want them to take.

Let’s put this into action: On your homepage, instead of displaying your whole bio, focus on a few sentences describing who you are and what you do and then offer your visitors options how you can help them: check out your yoga schedule, book a private session or come to your next workshop for example.

If you’re offering a lot of different services, try to structure them into categories so you don’t have more than 3 – 4 options to choose from on your homepage. The goal is it make it easy for your visitors to grab what you do and how you can help them, without overwhelming them with too much information and (unnecessary) options where they should click on.

This applies to your main navigation menu as well. Don’t overload your navigation menu with categories and sub-categories, you should try not having more than 7 topics in your main navigation. Not everything needs to be part of the navigation menu. Blog posts or categories for example don’t need to be.

It’s worth asking friends if they think your website structure makes sense. Sometimes we are just too close to what we do and we can profit from some outside perspective. What makes sense for you might be completely incomprehensible for someone else.

Mistake 2: Too Impersonal

Maybe you are reluctant too with sharing too much personal information online – I get it. But unfortunately, that doesn’t work in the online world anymore. People want to get to know the real you. Otherwise, why should they trust you and buy something from you?

You need to put yourself out there! Use up-to-date images on your homepage – invest in a yoga shooting if you have to. Welcome people to your page and introduce yourself with your name. Show up live on Instagram and Facebook so people can get to know you.

This also applies to blogging. I’ve seen too many posts from yoga teachers that could have been copied 1-to-1 from a yoga textbook. When you’re writing about something, don’t just write down the facts, instead make it relatable. Share a story about your experience, translate it into the modern world or how something helped you in a certain situation. It needs to be personal! Write as if you were having a conversation with your best friend, not lecturing a room of your YTT students.

Mistake 3:  Too Complicated

My number one advice? Keep it simple! If your website has way too much going on, it will distract your viewers from your content and services. Yes, you want your design to stand out, but make sure it doesn’t get to be too over the top. You can be creative, but there’s a fine balance between being whimsical and simply being confusing. Getting too complicated can be a big turn off for your visitors.

For example, in your navigation menu you don’t want people to have to guess what you mean – use names for your pages that are common and known, such as about and contact.

Next give your visitors specific actions that explicitly tell them what you want them to do. Do you want them to sign up for your email list? Then say that. Do you want them to check out your services so they can book you? Then tell them to do that. Make it as simple as possible for them to get to the information they need.

If you don’t have clear call-to-actions (like buttons that ask them to sign up), then you’ll risk losing potential students or subscribers to your list because they won’t be compelled to take it a step further from just browsing your website to actually taking action that supports your goals.

That’s it! These are the top three mistakes that I see yoga teachers making with their websites. With a few easy tweaks, you can easily avoid these mistakes, so you can be sure your website is working FOR you!