What should a free trial page for a martial arts school include?
One offer, a short form, the schedule underneath, and nothing else. Every extra link costs bookings.
One offer, or the page has none
Unbounce calls it attention ratio: the things you can do on a page against the number of things you should do. On a converting page it is 1:1 — one goal, one place to click. Across more than 20,000 lead generation landing pages, they found the pattern runs the obvious way: more links, lower conversion.
Most school trial pages break that ratio before a single navigation link is counted, because they carry four offers. Free trial class. Free week. Book a facility tour. Download the beginner’s guide. A mother who came to put her seven-year-old in one Tuesday class now has to pick which of four she wants, and the cheapest choice on offer is the back button.
Pick one, and pick the smallest one. A free week is a decision about your Tuesdays for the next month. One class is an afternoon.
A short form, not a novel
Name and a way to reach them. Phone is the better second field because the follow-up that gets read before Tuesday is a text from the coach — whichever CRM you run, Kicksite through Mindbody, the point is that a human sends it. Email is fine to add if you want a confirmation sitting in their inbox. A program dropdown, experience level, and “how did you hear about us” can wait until they have already said yes.
Baymard’s 2024 benchmark put the average e-commerce checkout at 11.3 form fields and concluded most sites need only eight — for a flow that has to collect a card and a shipping address. A trial page is not a checkout. Keep it short.
Then build the fields for a thumb. Baymard’s markup for a phone field is <input type="tel" inputmode="tel" autocorrect="off" autocomplete="tel">, which opens the number pad and lets the browser fill it in. Put labels above the fields — not beside them, and not inside them as grey placeholder text. Testing 18 mobile checkouts across more than a thousand form fields, Baymard found a left-aligned label leaves the field too narrow to show what was typed, so nobody catches their own typo before they submit.
What comes off, and what goes underneath
| On the page | What it costs | Instead |
|---|---|---|
| Header nav | Every item is a link away from the form, sitting under her thumb | Logo, no menu. People arrive from an ad or a search result; they don’t browse. |
| Footer links and social icons | An Instagram icon is a link to Instagram | Keep those on the home page, where leaving is allowed |
| A pricing table | Turns “try one class” into “decide about a monthly membership” | Prices belong in text on your pricing page — just not on this one |
| A second offer | Breaks the 1:1 ratio at the numerator, before a single link is counted | One offer. See above. |
| The schedule as a PDF | A download, a pinch-zoom, then nothing — and a crawler can’t read it either | Times in text, below the form |
| A chat widget | A second inbox nobody watches after 8pm | If you won’t answer it in ten minutes, take it off |
The schedule is the one thing that moves below the form rather than off the page. The unasked question on a trial page is not whether the school is any good — it is whether there is a class she can physically get to. School pickup is 3:15; she needs to see a 4:30 kids’ class before she hands over a number. Days, times, class name, age band, gi or no-gi, in text, no tap. Anyone who scrolls past that to the form has already answered the objection you would otherwise handle on the phone.
Your own phone number is the single exception to “nothing else clickable” — a call is not a competing link, it reaches the same goal. Make it a real tel: link near the form, and answer it. What it must not be is a picture of a number in a header, or the only way to book.
The page ends at submit
Everything above decides whether she taps the button. None of it decides whether she shows up on Tuesday.
So don’t hand her a “thanks, we’ll be in touch” alert. Send her to a confirmation page that names the class, the time, what to wear — she does not own a gi and does not need one — where to park, and who to ask for at the door. Then have a person, not the CRM, text her the same day.
Most schools will out-build their trial page long before they out-follow-up it. A short form in front of a coach who replies on Thursday will lose to a longer one in front of a coach who replies in ten minutes.
One trial page per program is in the build, wired to whatever you already run — Kicksite, Zen Planner, PushPress, Gymdesk, Mindbody. A short form — name and a way to reach them — is what we ship by default. Extra fields are your call; it is your funnel, and we will tell you what we think they cost. What the build includes.