Website Assessment Checklist for Australian Sports Clubs

Google your club's name. Go on - do it right now on your phone. What comes up?

If it's a Facebook page where the last post is from November, you already know the answer. If it's a WordPress site with a broken image slider and "Season 2022 Registrations Now Open" still on the homepage, you know the answer to that too. But most clubs never look at their website through a stranger's eyes. They see it as someone who already knows the training schedule, already has the treasurer's number, already knows where the ground is.

A stranger doesn't know any of that. And a stranger is who your website is for.

Why this matters more than you think

Your website is not a communication tool for existing members. (They're in the WhatsApp group. They don't visit your site.) Your website is the front door for four groups of people who are making a judgement about your club based on what they find online.

Prospective members. A parent Googles "netball club Moorabbin" or "junior cricket Toowoomba" and lands on whatever comes up first. They'll spend 10 seconds deciding whether this looks like a real, active organisation or something abandoned years ago. If your homepage answers "what sport, where, and how do I join?" - they'll click. If it doesn't, they'll try the next club in the results.

Sponsors. A local business considering a $2,000 sponsorship will check your website. If it looks professional and current, that signals you'll treat their investment seriously. If it looks like it was built in 2016, they'll wonder whether anyone will even see their logo.

Grant assessors. Australian Sports Commission, state sporting bodies, local councils - they all look at your online presence when evaluating applications. A current website signals an organised club. A dead one signals risk.

Parents. Before signing up their eight-year-old, parents want to know the club is safe and run by adults who are paying attention. Your website is their first impression.

And here's the bit that trips people up: a Facebook page is not a substitute. Facebook doesn't rank reliably in Google for location-based queries. You can't control the layout or what appears first. The algorithm decides who sees your posts - and it's not optimising for "parent looking for a soccer club." You need a web address you own and control.

The 20-point assessment checklist

Print this. Bring it to your next committee meeting. Score each item as Yes, No, or Partially. Be honest - there's no audience here except your own committee.

Findability

1. Does your club appear on the first page of Google when you search "[your sport] club [your suburb]"? Try it. If your club doesn't appear, neither you nor Google knows you exist in any useful way. This is the single most important test on this list.

2. Is your website URL on printed materials, jerseys, signage, and social media profiles? Every piece of collateral should drive people to your website. If your banner at the ground says the club name but not the URL, you're missing the easiest conversion path you have.

3. Do you have a Google Business Profile with accurate address, phone number, and hours? Free. Takes 15 minutes. It's what shows up in the map panel when someone searches for your club. If you haven't claimed yours, do it today. Go to business.google.com.

First impressions

4. Does your homepage clearly state what sport you play and where you're located? Sounds obvious. But I've seen club homepages that assume the visitor already knows - a big photo of a field, a club crest, and no text explaining what this is. Name the sport. Name the suburb or region. First two lines.

5. Is there a clear "Join" or "Register" button visible without scrolling? Above the fold. Not buried in a menu. Not hidden on a subpage called "Membership Information." A button that says "Join" or "Register Now," visible the moment the page loads.

6. Is the content current? If the most recent news item is from last season, your website looks abandoned. This is the single fastest way to kill credibility with a stranger. If you can't keep content current, remove the news section entirely - a sparse site is better than a stale one.

7. Does it load in under 3 seconds on mobile? Go to PageSpeed Insights and type in your URL. Over 70% of your visitors are on their phone. If your site takes five seconds to load because of an uncompressed hero image from 2018, people leave before it finishes rendering.

Essential information

8. Are training times and locations easy to find? This is the number one thing a prospective member wants after they've confirmed what sport and where. If they have to click three pages deep or download a PDF to find training times, you've lost them.

9. Are contact details visible - phone number, email, or a contact form? At minimum, a contact form and a general email. Ideally, a phone number for urgent enquiries. If the only contact method is a Facebook message, you're relying on someone checking Messenger - and that someone might be on holidays.

10. Is the current season's fixture or schedule available? Not last season's. This season's. If your season hasn't started, say when it starts. A schedule page showing Round 14 from 2024 tells the visitor nobody's maintaining this site.

11. Are fees and membership information published? People want to know what it costs before they reach out. If your fees aren't on the website, you're forcing every prospective member to email or call just to find out the price. Some will. Most won't.

12. Are committee members or key contacts listed? A prospective member - or a sponsor, or a council officer - wants to know real people are running this club. A page listing the president, secretary, and treasurer (with role-specific contact details, not personal mobiles) signals legitimacy.

Functionality

13. Can someone register or join online? If joining requires downloading a PDF, printing it, filling it in by hand, and bringing it to training on a Tuesday night - you're losing members. Full stop. Online registration isn't a nice-to-have. It's the minimum expectation in 2025.

14. Can someone pay online? Same principle. If a parent has to organise a bank transfer and email the treasurer with a reference number, you're creating unnecessary friction. Card or direct debit payments should be part of the registration flow.

15. Is there an events calendar or upcoming events section? A simple list of what's coming up - registration days, season start, social events, working bees. Doesn't need to be fancy. Needs to exist and be current.

16. Is the site mobile-responsive? Open your website on your phone. Does it look right? Can you read the text without zooming? Can you tap the buttons without accidentally hitting the wrong one? If the answer is no, your website doesn't work for the majority of your visitors.

Maintenance

17. Who updates it - and is that person still on the committee? This is the question most clubs avoid. If the answer is "Dave built it three years ago and he moved to Queensland," you have a problem. Every club website needs a named, current committee member responsible for updates.

18. How often is it actually updated? Monthly is the minimum. If it hasn't been touched in three months, it's drifting toward irrelevance. Your CMS or hosting dashboard will tell you when a page was last modified.

19. Is the domain name owned by the club, or by a person who might leave? If the domain is registered in Dave-who-moved-to-Queensland's personal GoDaddy account, the club doesn't own its own web address. Transfer it to a club account. Non-negotiable.

20. Is the hosting and CMS maintainable by a non-technical volunteer? This is the big one. WordPress requires regular updates - core software, plugins, themes, PHP versions. When those updates don't happen (and they don't, because the volunteer has a day job and two kids), the site breaks or gets hacked. The real question isn't "do we need a website?" It's "can a volunteer maintain this website without a web developer?"

The WordPress conversation

We need to talk about WordPress because roughly half the club websites we see are built on it.

WordPress is genuinely good software. It powers about 40% of the internet. But it was designed for publishers and adapted for everything else through plugins. A typical club WordPress site has a theme, a page builder, a forms plugin, a payments plugin, a security plugin, and a caching plugin. Each one needs updating. Each one can conflict with the others. Each one is a point of failure that no volunteer should have to troubleshoot on a weeknight.

And here's the deeper problem: your WordPress site and your membership system are separate. Someone fills out a form on the website, and then someone manually enters that information into whatever spreadsheet or system tracks members. Or someone pays through WooCommerce, and the treasurer reconciles that against the member list. It's double-handling, and double-handling creates errors and eats volunteer time.

We're biased - we'll say that upfront - but TidyHQ's built-in website builder exists specifically because of this problem. When someone joins through your TidyHQ website, they're already in your membership database. Payment recorded. Contact details stored. No second system. No CSV export. No "can someone update the spreadsheet?"

The trade-off is real: WordPress gives you more design flexibility. TidyHQ gives you less design control but dramatically less maintenance - and the integration between your website and your member data is automatic. For most volunteer-run clubs, that trade-off lands clearly on the side of less maintenance.

Borrow from the experts

Geoff Wilson includes a Website Assessment Checklist in his book Leading a Grassroots Sports Club - a practical handbook for volunteer committees covering governance through to game day operations. We reviewed it in detail and built several of his frameworks into guides on our blog. Read our full review here.

Wilson's checklist overlaps with ours on the essentials - findability, content currency, mobile responsiveness - but adds dimensions around brand consistency and alignment with your club's development plan. If you want to treat your web presence as part of a broader club strategy rather than just a thing you should probably have, his framework is worth the time.

How TidyHQ helps

We built the TidyHQ website builder for the committee volunteer who's been told "we need a website" and does not have time to learn WordPress, manage hosting, or chase a developer every time the training schedule changes. The builder sits inside the same platform that manages your memberships, events, and contacts - so your website pulls directly from live data. Update training times in TidyHQ and they update on the website. A member registers through the site and they appear in your member list immediately.

It won't win design awards. It's not trying to. It's trying to give your club a professional, mobile-friendly web presence that a volunteer can maintain in 20 minutes a month - and that ticks most of the 20 points on the checklist above without requiring a separate plugin, a separate system, or a separate person to manage it.

Frequently asked questions

How much should a sports club spend on a website?

You shouldn't need to spend more than $200–400 a year on domain registration and hosting for a standalone platform. If you're using TidyHQ, the website builder is included - the only additional cost is your domain name (around $15–40 per year for a .com.au). Where clubs get into trouble is paying $1,500+ for a custom WordPress build and then having nobody to maintain it after the developer moves on. The cheapest website is the one your current committee can actually keep updated.

Our Facebook page has more followers than our website gets visitors. Why bother with a website?

Because they serve different purposes. Your Facebook page talks to people who already know you. Your website talks to people who don't - the parent Googling "hockey club near me," the sponsor doing due diligence, the grant assessor checking your legitimacy. Facebook also controls who sees your posts through its algorithm. You post an announcement and maybe 15% of your followers see it. Your website shows the same information to 100% of visitors. Different tools for different jobs.

We scored badly on this checklist. Where do we start?

Start with items 1, 4, 5, and 6 - they affect whether a prospective member sticks around past the first 10 seconds. Claim your Google Business Profile (item 3) while you're at it. Then tackle items 13 and 14 - online registration and payment. Those six items alone will change how many enquiries turn into actual members. The rest can follow over the next few committee meetings.

If you scored well on most of these points, your website is doing its job. If you didn't - and particularly if items 17 through 20 are the problem - it might be time to rethink the platform, not just the content. [See TidyHQ's website builder](/products/web-pages), or [start a free trial](/pricing) and build a test page before you commit.

References

• Geoff Wilson - Leading a Grassroots Sports Club - Practical guide to club development including a website assessment framework for volunteer-run clubs
• Australian Sports Commission - Federal government agency providing digital presence guidance for community sporting organisations
• Google Business Profile - Free tool for clubs to manage their search and map listing
• PageSpeed Insights - Google's free tool for testing website performance and mobile responsiveness
• Play by the Rules - Resources for safe and inclusive sport, including guidance on club communication and online presence
• Sport Integrity Australia - National body providing governance and operational standards relevant to club digital presence