How to make an academy website that fills your next intake

TL;DR: How to make an academy website

This guide walks you through building an academy website from scratch. You'll choose a domain, start from a template built for academies, add the pages a prospective student looks for first, and list your courses, term dates and fees so someone comparing options can weigh you against the academy down the road. You'll finish with an enrolment enquiry form that captures what you need to respond.

From there the guide covers showing your classrooms and campus, claiming your Google Business Profile, and targeting the searches prospective students actually type. Work through the ten steps and you'll go into your next intake with a site that answers a student's questions before they ever call.

What to include

Top features of an academy website

How to make an academy
website in 10 steps

Your domain is the address prospective students will type, save and repeat to a friend or colleague. Use your academy's name, paired with your city if you serve one area, and go with .com where you can get it. It still reads as the most established choice to a prospect doing due diligence before committing time and money to a course.

Skip hyphens and numbers. Someone repeating "brightpath-academy-online" over the phone will drop the hyphen and land on the wrong site. Whatever you register, use the exact same name on your Google Business Profile and any signage outside the building.

Yola lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and any annual plan includes a free domain for the first year.

You don't need to write code or hire a developer to get an academy website live. Yola website builder lets you edit text, swap photos and rearrange sections yourself, the same way you'd edit a document.

Answer a handful of questions about your academy and Yola's AI Website Builder puts together a first draft to work from. The full set of AI tools is on the paid plans; the free plan gives you basic AI to start with.

Start from a template built for the kind of academy you run, rather than a blank page. Hosting is included, so there's nothing extra to set up before you publish.

Start from a template

Academy templates to start from

You don't need dozens of pages. A handful does most of the work, and every prospective student looks for the same few.

Build these first, then add anything else once the essentials are live:

List every course the way you'd actually say it to a prospective student on the phone, not a generic "Level 2 programme". Where a course draws enough of its own search interest, give it its own page with the timetable and instructor named.

Show tuition honestly. A starting figure for your standard programmes lets someone self-qualify before they enquire, often while comparing you against another academy on their lunch break. Where a fee is bespoke, tied to a scholarship, or set per assessment, say "contact us for fees" rather than invent a number.

Yola's Services and Pricing blocks are built for exactly this: a course name, a short description and a price sitting together, which you can edit yourself the moment a fee changes.

A prospective student can't tell from a course description alone whether your academy actually looks like somewhere worth showing up to. Photos do that work instead: real classrooms in use, students working with the actual equipment or materials, and the building or campus itself, not a stock photo of a generic office.

Shoot straight on in good light, and keep the set current. A photo of a room you've since renovated undercuts the trust you're building rather than adding to it. Name image files for what's in them, like brightpath-academy-classroom.jpg rather than IMG_2041.jpg, and add the same description as alt text so the photos can also turn up in a local image search.

Yola's ready-made Galleries block is built to hold a set like this, so you can add and swap photos yourself as the campus and classes change.

Not every interested student will pick up the phone, especially outside office hours when they're still at work, so give them a form that does the same job. Keep it to the handful of fields that let you actually respond: their current level or background, the programme they're interested in, and when they can start.

You choose exactly which fields appear, because Yola's contact form is customizable rather than a fixed template, and you can read how in the Forms block help article. A submission is an enquiry, not an order, and Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment someone submits, so they know it landed even if you don't reply until morning.

Then follow up quickly. Most academies win or lose an enrolment on how fast the first reply comes, not on what it says.

A student choosing an academy is really asking one question: is this a real, qualified place worth spending my evenings and my tuition fee on? Answer it before they have to ask, with the specific proof your academy actually holds.

That means an accredited curriculum, certified instructors, and any awarding-body affiliation that applies to your programmes, stated plainly rather than buried on an About page nobody reads. Put these on the home page, ideally in the first screen a visitor sees, not several clicks in.

Term dates and open days go stale fast, and a stale date on your site costs you attendance, not just credibility. Keep one page current with your upcoming intake dates and any open days or taster sessions.

For each entry, give the date, time, place, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a place, which should point straight to your enquiry form rather than a separate booking system. This isn't a calendar feature. It's a page you edit by hand, and once it's set up, editing it takes minutes.

Leave past dates on the page rather than deleting them. A list of open days that have actually run is quiet evidence that your terms happen on schedule.

Most prospective students searching for you will type a subject and a place, not your name, so local search is where you're found or missed. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability handles the technical basics; the rest is work you do off the site.

Before you tell a single prospective student the site is live, test it on your own phone the way one would, probably during a commute or a lunch break. Tap the enquiry button, submit the form yourself, and check that the automatic confirmation actually arrives.

Check page speed on your main pages too, since someone comparing a few academies won't wait for a slow one to load. Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive by default, so the layout adapts on its own across phone, tablet and laptop, and every site gets automatic SSL and automatic backups.

Once you're live, keep the site current. Add new results and photos after each term, update fees and term dates as they change, and revisit anything that no longer describes how you actually teach. A site that's kept current holds its search ranking better than one left to go stale.

Common academy website mistakes to avoid

A handful of mistakes show up again and again on academy sites, and each one costs enquiries you'd otherwise get.

How much does an academy website cost?

Building your academy website on Yola starts free. Move up when you need more pages, storage or the full AI Website Builder: that's free plan, then $9.95/mo, with a free domain included on annual plans.

Compare that with hiring it out. A freelancer or small agency building a comparable academy site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, before any ongoing maintenance.

Building it yourself means you stay in control after launch. When a term date changes or a new instructor joins, you update the page yourself in minutes instead of waiting on an invoice.