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Discover how to use fonts, spacing, and imagery effectively by reviewing three yoga studio websites and learn how to improve your own site.
When potential clients visit your yoga studio's website, you want them to feel a sense of calm and clarity from the start. A clean, welcoming design is essential to creating a lasting impression and making sure visitors feel comfortable taking the next step.
In this article, I’m reviewing the websites of three local yoga studios - Body & Brain Centreville, MIYU, and Stay Golden Yoga - to uncover strengths and areas for improvement in their designs. We’ll dive into font pairings, proper spacing, consistent plugin styling, and overall user flow. By the end, you’ll gain practical insights to refine your own website or inspire new design ideas for your yoga or wellness business.
When you explore the homepage of Body & Brain (Centreville), the sense of cohesiveness is immediately apparent. While a strong color scheme plays a significant role, the consistent use of spacing, alignment, and visual accents is equally vital to this unified feel.
Third-party plugins like contact forms or calendars often get added in with their default settings, which can lead to clashing styles. By giving that extra effort to match them to your site’s design, the overall experience feels much more polished and consistent.
This calendar matches the overall look and feel of the homepage. It uses the brand’s teal for tabs and orange for titles. It also features rounded corners throughout - from the event cards to the tabs and the Daily/Weekly toggle. The rounded shapes help convey a sense of friendliness and approachability.
That same soft-edged look carries over into the contact form. Both of these elements follow a consistent layout of white cards placed on a colored background with matching shadows for depth and cohesion.
These interactive sections mirror other design elements on the homepage like pricing tables and information cards, creating a consistent look and feel.
The site primarily uses a popular sans-serif font called Lato. A sans-serif font does not have the small decorative lines known as "serifs" at the ends of letter strokes. Known for their straightforward appearance, sans-serif fonts are commonly used in digital design and modern layouts because of their legibility and simplicity.
The site uses a thoughtful font pairing to balance readability with personality. They use a serif font in the headers for emphasis and to add a touch of elegance.
These headers stand out not just because of the font choice, but also because they’re styled in brand colors, helping key messages pop while reinforcing the site’s visual identity.
Strategically incorporating a second font can be a subtle yet powerful way to draw attention and add emphasis to key elements on a page.
MIYU’s homepage communicates a strong message of growth and wellness through both its uplifting copy and soothing visuals.
The language throughout the site is very positive and encouraging. Here are some of the headings and sentences that are used:
Instead of just listing amenities, MIYU paints a vivid picture of calm, healing, and self-care, making it easy for visitors to connect emotionally with the brand.
The header images all share a similar feel and color tone that gives the site a calm and cohesive feel. Each image reinforces themes of freedom and relaxation, setting the mood right from the start.
The custom icon set adds personality with its hand-drawn, freeform style. It feels light, approachable, and organic.
Paired with the brand’s green color, which evokes growth and nature, all of these design choices work together to create a sense of ease and lightness throughout the site. When it comes to shaping how visitors perceive your brand, every image right down to every sentence plays a part in setting the overall tone.
We talked in the previous section about the header images. One of the suggestions is to add more padding so that the sentence doesn’t extend across the entire page.
Maintaining consistent padding improves readability. In a carousel, where content shifts between panels, keeping a uniform width for headings and text makes for a smoother experience.
This site uses a sticky navigation bar, which means it remains fixed at the top of the screen even when the user scrolls down the page.
This navigation bar is unusually tall, which cuts into the space available for the rest of the content. The ideal height for navigation bars on mobile screens is between 45-55px, and for desktop screens, that number is between 50-65px. MIYU’s navbar has a height of 150px, more than double the recommended size.
A simple fix is to shrink the logo once the user scrolls. Cutting it down in size and removing the text underneath helps clean up the sticky nav without affecting the original navigation bar at the top when the page initially loads.
By cleaning up these details with padding and spacing, you can get a more user-friendly site.
The homepage for Stay Golden Yoga gives off a more active, rejuvenating, and vibrant feel.
With its use of bold gradients, dynamic imagery, bright colors, and intricate patterns, the vibe is noticeably different from Body & Brain or MIYU and feels full of movement.
When there’s a lot happening on a page, it can quickly feel overwhelming if you don’t use adequate whitespace to give each section and element room to breathe. Here are some examples of different areas on the homepage that could use more spacing.
This is similar to what was discussed earlier - the importance of having an appropriate width and height for elements. Similarly, by increasing the spacing between images and between sections, you can clearly delineate where one thread ends and another begins, making it a more enjoyable experience.
At the end of the day, your site exists because you want visitors to take action. Your end goal for them is probably one or more of the following:
This means that whatever your desired call-to-action is, it should be prominently displayed and easy to get to.
This contact form is very hard to see, and if not for the large submit button, it’s too easy to miss. By just adding a white background behind the form, you’ll be able to see the input labels.
A contact form should clearly communicate what you're asking for, so users don’t run into any unnecessary obstacles when filling it out. One of the fields says “Subject” and another says “Type your message here...” This form feels too open-ended without any context. A short introduction like “Have questions about Stay Golden Yoga? Please fill out this form and we’re happy to chat about memberships, pricing, or upcoming events.” would guide users and encourage them to reach out.
Stay Golden Yoga also has an email subscription to stay updated on community news and events.
It’s asking you to subscribe, but you need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to actually do so.
The best practice is to have the subscribe from right there when you make your pitch, removing any potential distractions. It’s far too easy for users to scroll away and move on to the next thing, so you should always make it easy for them to take action.
Design sets the tone before a single word is read. It’s all the little design choices like a clean layout, thoughtful spacing, and a clear message coming together. Especially for yoga studios and wellness brands, you want that feeling to hit as soon as someone lands on the homepage.
If you're a business owner looking to refine your website this year, please fill out the contact form and mention that you'd like a website review in the project description. I'll personally evaluate your site and provide a consultation with tailored feedback and a plan of action.
