I speak to a lot of club committees who know something isn't quite right with their website but can't put their finger on what. It was built a few years ago by a member who's since moved house, it looked fine at the time, and now? The renewals chair is fed up of chasing cheques and the secretary is tired of WhatsApping fixtures every Friday.
Here are seven signs your club's website is overdue an upgrade, and what to do about each one.
1. Members Can't Renew Online
This is the big one. If your treasurer is still chasing cheques and bank transfers every September, the website is doing about half of the job it should.
What a proper member renewal page does:
- Lets members pay by card or direct debit in two clicks
- Sends an automatic receipt to their email
- Captures lapsed members who forgot last year
- Frees up 30-50 hours of treasurer time per season
Clubs that switch to online renewals consistently see renewal rates lift in the first season because the lapsed members get nudged and the act of paying takes seconds rather than minutes of finding the chequebook.
A member portal with Stripe integration handles card and direct debit. Standard on the £50/month tier of most subscription providers. Pays for itself in saved treasurer time inside one renewal cycle.
2. Fixtures Live in a PDF
If a member has to download a PDF to find out who they're playing on Saturday, the website is making the club's life harder. Two things almost always go wrong: the PDF is out of date because nobody re-uploaded it after the last reschedule, and on a phone it's unreadable without pinching and zooming.
A proper fixtures page is a live table that the team captain or fixtures secretary can update from their phone in 20 seconds. No PDFs, no Word docs, no "let me email the latest one".
3. The Volunteer Who Built It Has Left
This one comes up every time. A keen member who knew Wix built the site five years ago, did a great job, then moved away or stepped back from the committee. Now nobody on the committee can change anything, the password is a guess, and the email address linked to the account belongs to someone who no longer answers.
If your club's website is held together by one volunteer's goodwill and that volunteer is no longer around, you're one broken plugin away from a dead site at the worst possible moment - usually the week before renewals open.
The fix is to move to a setup where the website is somebody's actual job, not a favour. A subscription provider, a maintained SaaS platform, or a paid retainer with a freelancer - any of those beat "we'll ask Tony if he can have a look".
4. Mobile Phones Break the Layout
The majority of UK web traffic now comes from mobile, and for sports clubs the share is even higher because members check fixtures on a phone the morning of a match. If your site is hard to use on a phone - tiny text, buttons too small to tap, having to pinch and zoom - a lot of your members are silently giving up.
Open your club's website on your phone right now. Can you:
- Find this week's fixtures without scrolling forever?
- Tap "renew membership" without missing?
- Read the news section without zooming?
- Find a contact email for the secretary?
If you answered "no" to any of these, that's the urgent fix. Google also actively demotes mobile-broken sites in search results, so prospective new members searching "rowing club Peterborough" never see you.
5. Pages Load Painfully Slowly
We've all abandoned a website that takes too long to load. Google's own research has long pointed to a few seconds as the threshold past which most visitors give up - by the time you're looking at 5+ seconds, a large share of your visitors are gone.
Slow club sites are usually caused by:
- Photo galleries with full-resolution JPGs straight off a phone
- Cheap shared hosting that struggles under any real load
- Outdated CMS plugins layered on top of each other
- An old website builder that wasn't built for speed
Test your club's site with Google's free PageSpeed Insights. If anything is in the red, you're losing visitors before the page renders.
6. The Design Looks Dated
Web design changes. What looked sharp in 2018 looks tired today. For sports clubs this matters because your website is often the first impression prospective members get. A dated site can make a thriving club look like it's not really running.
Telltale signs the design is showing its age:
- Carousel sliders nobody clicks through
- Stock photos of generic athletes that aren't from your club
- Cluttered menus with 14 items
- Tiny body text with low contrast
- Design that screams "early 2010s WordPress theme"
Look at your county or regional governing body's recent club showcases. If your site looks noticeably worse than the clubs you compete against, it's costing you in juniors and new members.
Good design today is simpler and cleaner. Plenty of white space, clear typography, real club photos. You don't need animations or gimmicks - you need the site to feel current and trustworthy.
7. New Members Aren't Joining Online
This is the ultimate test. Your club's website exists to do three things: keep current members informed, recruit new members, and reduce admin for the committee. If new members aren't coming in via the site, something's wrong.
Common reasons club sites don't convert prospective members:
- No clear "join the club" button on the homepage
- Membership prices hidden two levels deep or "ask the secretary"
- No clear explanation of what a typical week looks like
- No photos of actual members training or competing
- "Contact us" form that goes to a generic Gmail nobody checks
If you're getting visitors but no enquiries, the site is leaking them. If you're getting neither, the site has a discoverability problem too - probably weak local SEO or no Google Business Profile.
What to Do Next
If you recognised your club in two or more of these signs, it's worth raising at the next committee meeting. That doesn't necessarily mean replacing everything - sometimes focused improvements (mobile fix, member portal, fixtures upgrade) make a big difference for a few hundred pounds.
Start by being honest about what's working and what isn't. Test the site on your phone. Ask the renewals chair how many cheques they're still chasing. Look at competing clubs' websites.
If you'd like a second opinion, I'm happy to take a quick look at your club's website and give honest feedback. No sales pitch - just practical advice on whether it's worth investing in a refresh and where to start.
For numbers on what a replacement actually costs, see the UK sports club website pricing breakdown, the Wix vs Nene IT comparison, or the subscription website service - the route most clubs take when an old site needs replacing.
