Groups by pace
A website organised by pace, not by level
Website design for a running and trail club
In a running club, people are not grouped by category but by speed. A runner at 5 min/km and one at 7 do not run together.
In a running club, people are not grouped by category but by speed. A runner at 5 min/km and one at 7 do not run together.
Group outings by pace, a meeting point that keeps moving, a race calendar, and a sport practised outdoors in all weathers.
5, 5:30, 6 minutes per kilometre. It is the only split that works: group people by age or by seniority and the pack falls apart inside the first kilometre.
Car park, track, leisure centre. It changes with the route; it belongs on the outing itself, not in a message from three weeks ago.
Group race entries, car sharing, accommodation for a distant trail race. One online sign-up per race saves you the shared spreadsheet.
A running club has no premises and no equipment: the membership fee is low, so it has to be collected without disproportionate handling charges.
Groups by pace
The meeting point, for every outing
The club race calendar
A simple annual membership
The searches are local and social: "running club" plus the town, "running in a group", "trail club".
What people want to know: how fast the group runs, where it meets, and whether they can come along once to try. Three answers missing from most club websites.
Say there is no minimum level if that is true: the fear of being the slowest is the number one deterrent.
Safety. Night outings, lighting, reflective vest: a written instruction is better than an oral reminder at the start.
Group bibs. Many clubs buy bibs in batches; online registration and payment avoids the need for a cash advance by a volunteer.
The medical certificate remains required for the competition; its validity is indicated in the form.
A running club website does not need to be a polished shop window. It has to answer three questions in under a minute: what pace people run at, when, and how to join the group. The club's history and the photos from the last race come afterwards, because nobody signs up to a photo gallery. Building a useful site therefore starts with the order of the information, and the design dresses that order, never the other way round.
With those five pages you have a credible web project. It is the skeleton found on every association website that works, and we set it out in our guide to what content to publish on an association website. BetterSport builds that structure bespoke, with a connected schedule where every run carries its own meeting point: your members find the information where they look for it, and you stop rewriting the same message every Thursday evening.
The searches are short, local and slightly anxious. People type the name of their town followed by "running club", sometimes "running in a group", "trail running club" or "running association". Behind those words there is rarely a competitor: there is someone who wants to get back into sport and does not want to run alone. Your site has to speak to that person first.
If someone types your club's name, you come up. The real challenge is the runner who does not yet know you exist. For them to find you, you need pages that use their words: the pace in minutes per kilometre, the neighbourhoods or the trails you run, the word "beginner" if it belongs there. A single page that talks about everything ranks for nothing; several precise pages, one per activity and per audience, work far better.
A filled-in Google business listing, a link from the federation's site, another from the municipal sports office: that is what lifts a club in local searches. Pick a readable domain name too, .com or .fr, close to the club's name and easy to dictate over the phone. A BetterSport site is designed and search-optimised for the activity, with separate pages for your road runs, your interval sessions and your trail runs — each able to rank on its own searches.
Most club websites do not fall short on effort, but on accumulation. Things get added, nothing is ever taken away, and the live information drowns under the dead. Here is what we see most often.
What these mistakes have in common: they push the work onto the committee. Every paper form becomes a chaser, every spreadsheet becomes an evening of data entry. Clubs in other disciplines hit exactly the same walls, whether an athletics club with its age groups or a triathlon club with its three stretches of water and its pool slots. The answer is the same: tools that record things for you.
A runner who discovers your club on Tuesday should be able to turn up to Saturday's run without having spoken to anyone. That path has four steps: they read the page for the group matching their pace, they book a taster run, they get a confirmation with the exact meeting place, and they get a reminder the day before. If any one of those steps requires an exchange of emails, you lose half of them.
BetterSport handles that journey with a booking system built on limited places: you open twenty places on an interval session, and the twenty-first person goes onto the waiting list and moves up automatically if someone drops out. Payment is taken at booking through Stripe, which settles the annual membership fee, group race entries and the car-sharing contribution for a distant trail race all in one go. No more fronting the money, no more cheques to bank, no more chasing.
Between September and June, club life happens in the emails: the run moved because of a storm, entries opening for the half marathon, the reminder to members whose medical certificate is about to expire. Automated emails — confirmations, chasers, campaigns — go out without anyone attending to them. Your members stay informed, and your secretary gets their Sunday evenings back.
You are not after one more piece of software: you want a site that fills the runs and collects the membership fees without adding to your workload. BetterSport is a complete platform for clubs and coaches, with a bespoke website, designed and search-optimised for your activity, and bespoke software alongside an iOS and Android mobile app under your own brand. Your runners book from their phones, your volunteers never enter anything by hand again.
To get started, tell us how your season is organised: your pace groups, your goals for the year, how many members you handle today and how you collect the membership fee. We start from those real needs, not from a template. The trial lasts 14 days, free and with no card required, long enough to create your first sessions and see whether your members find their way around.
If you would rather talk it through before committing, you can talk to an expert or simply start your free 14-day trial and create your first pace group within the hour.
Yes, as many as you need, each with its own outing and its own meeting point.
Yes — it belongs to the outing, not to the club.
Yes, as a limited-places service, with payment and car sharing.
If you offer it: a taster outing, free or not, bookable online.
It depends on what the site has to do. A brochure site on its own is cheap but takes no admin off your hands. With BetterSport, the site, the bookings, the payments and the mobile app are all part of the same subscription: you can try the lot for 14 days with no card required before deciding.
There are free web tools for publishing a few pages, and they are fine if all you want is an online presence. The limit appears as soon as you have to manage members, collect a membership fee or keep track of waiting lists: those functions are missing, and the work falls back on the volunteers. That is the difference between a page about the club and a site that runs it.
You do, with no technical skill needed. Runs, groups and races are edited from an admin area; the site updates itself. Several people on the committee can have access, which avoids depending on the one volunteer who knows how to log in.
Yes. If your existing site suits you, a booking widget slots into your pages and brings the schedule, the limited places and online payment without rebuilding everything. It is often the first step for a club already committed to a web project, ahead of a full rebuild later on.