If you’ve been told your website needs the “StoryBrand treatment,” you’ve probably gone looking for real examples to see what that means. And you’ve probably found a pile of roundups full of SaaS companies and mattress brands.
Helpful if you sell mattresses. Less helpful if you’re a coach trying to figure out what a StoryBrand homepage looks like for a business like yours.
I’m a Certified StoryBrand Guide, and I’ve built over 150 websites for coaches and online businesses, so I use this framework on client sites all the time. In this post I’ll show you StoryBrand website examples the way I look at them: element by element, on real client sites, so you can see what each piece looks like on the page and copy the thinking for your own.
Quick Summary
- A StoryBrand website organizes your pages around your client as the hero and you as the guide, so a visitor instantly understands what you do and what to do next.
- The 7 elements (character, problem, guide, plan, call to action, success, failure) each have a home on the page. This post shows you where.
- The examples here are real client sites from my own portfolio, so the patterns transfer to a business like yours.
- The biggest difference between a StoryBrand site and a merely pretty site is clarity. A visitor should get what you do within about five seconds.
What Is a StoryBrand Website?
A StoryBrand website is a site built around the StoryBrand framework, where your ideal client is cast as the hero, you show up as the guide, and every page points them toward one clear action. The goal is instant clarity, so a visitor understands who you help and what to do next without having to work for it.
The framework comes from Donald Miller’s book Building a StoryBrand, and the short version is that people don’t buy the best product. They buy the one they can understand the fastest. On a website, that means your words and layout have to do the storytelling for you.
I chose StoryBrand as the backbone of my design process for exactly that reason. Coaches are brilliant at what they do and often stuck when it comes to explaining it on a homepage, because they’re too close to it. The framework gives you a repeatable way out of that.
One quick note on scope. This post is about the website, what StoryBrand looks like on a live page. If you want the full seven-part script written out for real coaches, I broke that down separately in my post on brandscript examples. Think of that one as the script and this one as the set.
The 7 StoryBrand Elements and Where They Live on Your Site
Before the examples, here’s the quick map. A StoryBrand story has seven parts, and each one has a natural home on a website. Once you know where to look, you’ll start seeing this pattern on every good coaching site.
- The character (your client) lives in your hero section, the top of the homepage.
- The problem shows up right below, naming what your client is struggling with.
- The guide (you) appears through empathy and authority, often an about blurb plus proof.
- The plan is usually three simple steps that make working with you feel easy.
- The call to action is your buttons, repeated and impossible to miss.
- Success is the picture of life after working with you.
- Failure is the quiet reminder of what’s at stake if nothing changes.
Now let’s look at each one on a real client site.
StoryBrand Website Example: The Hero Section (Character)
The hero section is the top of your homepage, and in a StoryBrand website it answers three questions fast: what you offer, how it makes the visitor’s life better, and what to do to get it. The visitor is the hero of this section, and the first words on the page belong to them.
My client Krista St-Germain is a strong example of character clarity. Her hero headline is seven words: “I help widows truly love life again.” The subhead underneath, “Evidence-based grief support and coaching to transition from surviving to thriving,” tells that same woman exactly what kind of help she’s found. When a grieving widow lands on the site, she sees herself immediately, which is the whole job of a hero section.
The mistake I see most often is a hero section that talks about the coach. “Certified life coach with 15 years of experience” tells the visitor nothing about themselves. Flip it so the first thing they read is about them and the change they want.
StoryBrand Website Example: Naming the Problem
Just below the hero, a StoryBrand website names the problem the client is facing, out loud, in their own words. When a visitor sees their exact struggle described on the page, they trust that you understand them, and trust is what earns the next click.
The trick is to name both the external problem and the internal one. Take a coach who helps people sleep. The external problem is “I can’t fall asleep.” The internal problem is “I’m exhausted and short with everyone I love.” The second one is what gets people to act.
Becky Garner does this well. Becky coaches women of faith through anxiety and depression, and right under her hero the page names it straight: “You’ve tried everything to feel better and nothing sticks.” The section then walks through what all that trying looked like, the self-help books, the diet changes, the medicines, and lands on the feeling of being stuck anyway. That’s the internal problem named plainly, and it’s why her ideal client feels seen.
If you want to see how a problem gets written into a full brandscript before it ever hits the page, that’s exactly what my brandscript examples post walks through for Becky and two other clients.
StoryBrand Website Example: Positioning Yourself as the Guide
In a StoryBrand website, you’re the guide, not the hero, and you earn that role two ways: empathy and authority. Empathy shows you understand the problem. Authority shows you can solve it. Together they make you the obvious person to help.
Empathy usually reads like “I know how exhausting this is” near the top of the page. Authority reads like testimonials, certifications, client results, and logos. You need both. Empathy without authority feels nice but unconvincing. Authority without empathy feels cold.
This is where being a coach is an advantage. You already have the empathy. What most coaching sites underuse is the authority half, especially client work and specific results. When I redesigned Dorothy Johnson’s breakup-coaching site around conversion, her sales page conversions went up 44 percent. Same expertise, clearer positioning as the guide.
Getting your guide messaging right on the homepage is one of the most valuable things you can do for your site, so if you’re writing yours from scratch, grab my free Homepage Copy Planner. It walks you through the exact words to put in each section of your homepage, including your empathy and authority statements, so you’re not staring at a blank page.
StoryBrand Website Example: The Plan
A StoryBrand website gives visitors a simple plan, usually three steps, that makes working with you feel easy and low-risk. The plan removes the fog. When someone can see exactly how this works, the fear of the unknown stops holding them back.
Three steps is the sweet spot because three is easy to remember. Think 9-1-1, or stop, drop, and roll. A coaching plan might be as simple as “Book a call, build your plan together, start feeling better.” The steps double as your onboarding, so they’re worth getting right.
Jackie Swainson uses a gentle version of this. Jackie coaches women reinventing themselves in midlife, and her three steps are “Download the Worksheet,” “Answer the Questions,” and “Reach Out for More Help.” Notice how small that first step is. For an audience that feels overwhelmed, a worksheet is a much easier yes than a big scary call, and it makes the whole plan read like the next small step.
StoryBrand Website Example: The Call to Action
The call to action is the single most important button on a StoryBrand website, and it should be direct, repeated, and impossible to miss. There should be zero confusion about what to do next. One primary action, said the same way, all the way down the page.
Here’s a stat that still surprises me. Roughly 70 percent of businesses on US-based websites fail to provide a clear call to action. That’s a huge, free advantage for any coach willing to just put one obvious button in the top right and repeat it.
The two flavors that work for coaches are a direct CTA (“Book a Consult”) and a transitional one for people who aren’t ready yet (“Download the free guide”). Offer both, but never let the transitional one crowd out the direct one. When Dave Moreno’s site stopped leaking visitors and pointed them clearly toward the next step, he saw a 10x return in his first month post-launch. A clear CTA is often the cheapest fix with the biggest payoff.
StoryBrand Website Example: Success and Failure (The Stakes)
A StoryBrand website paints two futures: the success that comes from working with you, and the failure the client avoids by not staying stuck. You don’t need to be heavy-handed. A light touch of stakes is what gives the success section its weight.
Success is the picture of life after coaching. Krista’s site promises the move “from surviving to thriving,” and her testimonials make it concrete, like the client who went from not wanting to get off her couch to knowing she can do this. That’s a future a reader can picture, and it lands harder than a vague promise to feel better.
Failure is the quiet counterweight. My client Joe Graci coaches founders whose companies depend on them too heavily, and his site names the cost of staying stuck in two short lines: “You’ve built yourself into a bottleneck” and “Dependencies mean missed revenue and exit opportunities.” He never gets heavy-handed about it. A plain statement of what waiting costs is all a stakes line needs to do.
What Makes a StoryBrand Website Work for Coaches?
A StoryBrand website works when it puts the client’s story first, states everything in plain language, and points to one clear action on every page. The test is simple: can a stranger tell what you do, who you help, and what to do next within about five seconds of landing on your homepage?
That five-second test is the thing to keep coming back to. Most coaching sites fail it because they’re written from the inside, full of the coach’s methodology and journey. StoryBrand flips the camera around so the visitor sees themselves first.
A few patterns hold across every good coaching site I’ve built:
- The words come first. The layout serves the message, not the other way around. Pretty design can’t rescue unclear copy.
- One idea per section. Each scroll answers one question. Crowd a section with three ideas and the visitor remembers none of them.
- Repetition is a feature. The same CTA, said the same way, several times down the page. Saying it the same way every time is what makes it easy to act on.
- Proof is everywhere. Testimonials and client results show up throughout the page, right where each claim needs the backing.
I use the StoryBrand framework on every coaching site I design for exactly this reason. It’s the difference between a site that looks nice and a site that quietly sells for you while you sleep. If you want a site built this way, that’s the heart of my web design for coaches.
Where StoryBrand Website Design Goes Wrong
Even with the framework, coaching sites go sideways in a handful of predictable ways. The framework is a guide, not a guarantee, and applying it mechanically can be as bad as ignoring it.
The most common miss is making yourself the hero. You put your face and your story at the top, and the visitor has to dig to find themselves. The fix is to lead with them.
The second is drowning the one call to action in ten competing links. Pick the one action you want most and let it dominate the page.
The third is treating StoryBrand as a fill-in-the-blank template. The framework tells you what to say and where, but it can’t write in your voice or capture your specific client. That still takes a human who knows both the framework and copywriting for coaches. A brandscript filled out by rote and pasted onto a page reads exactly like a brandscript filled out by rote.
Frequently Asked Questions About StoryBrand Websites
What is a StoryBrand website?
A StoryBrand website is a site built on Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework, where your client is the hero and you’re the guide. Every page is organized so a visitor instantly understands what you do, how it helps them, and what to do next, with one clear action leading the way.
Do I need to be a certified StoryBrand guide to use it on my site?
No. Anyone can read Building a StoryBrand and apply it. A certified guide just does it faster and catches the subtle misses, like a hero section that accidentally centers the coach. If you’d rather not learn a framework while also running your business, that’s when hiring one makes sense.
What’s the difference between a brandscript and a StoryBrand website?
A brandscript is the seven-part script you write first, on paper. A StoryBrand website is that script translated onto live pages, layout and all. The script is the plan and the site is the build. I cover full brandscripts in a separate post if you want to see the writing side.
Can I build a StoryBrand website myself?
Yes, especially if you’re just starting out and keeping costs low. The framework is learnable, and a good starting template saves you from a blank page. My Website Kit for Coaches is built on these principles so you get the structure baked in without having to reverse-engineer it.
How long should a StoryBrand homepage be?
Long enough to move through the elements, short enough to stay clear. Most effective coaching homepages walk through hero, problem, guide, plan, success, and a repeated call to action, then stop. If a section isn’t earning its place in the story, cut it.
Putting StoryBrand to Work on Your Own Site
So those are StoryBrand website examples the way a guide reads them: element by element, on real client sites, so you can spot each piece in the wild. Once you can find the hero section, the problem, the guide, the plan, and the call to action, you’ll never look at your own homepage the same way.
You know your clients better than any framework does, so trust yourself to describe their story in plain, human language. That’s most of the battle.
If you’re an established coach who’d rather hand the whole thing to someone who does this every day, take a look at my web design for coaches, where StoryBrand is baked into every build. And if you’re just getting started and want to keep costs low, the Website Kit for Coaches gives you a StoryBrand-ready starting point. Either way, feel free to get in touch if you’d like a second set of eyes.
I hope this post was helpful!
Read more: 3 Helpful StoryBrand BrandScript Examples for Coaches
