With the available website builders, you can easily create any kind of fitness websites.
But the problem generally, is not how to create a fitness website, or how to use a website builder, but most people are confused about how to create a best fitness website, the required features, how to manage and operate a great fitness website.
So we studied some of the best fitness websites, and tried to figure out what they are doing the best, the common features amongst them, and how to promote and maintain it.
Therefore, here are some of the most common tips, definitions, requirements and more, to help you build and maintain a great fitness website.
Table of Content:
- Types of fitness websites
- WordPress for fitness websites
- How to build a fitness website?
- Maintaining Fitness Websites
- How to promote your fitness websites
- Tips, Tricks & Ideas for best Fitness websites
Types of Fitness websites
You can build multiple types of fitness related websites based on what your purpose is. You can be a fitness trainer expert in personal training and looking to create a website for the purpose of online presence, or want to run a website for fitness enthusiasts to reach their health and fitness goals.
Roughly, the following are a few types of fitness websites that you can build. You can create a great fitness website with one of these purpose, or create a website with combination of one or more of these intents.
Fitness Event Websites
As the name suggests, if you are an event manager, or even organization specializing in fitness events, you can create an events directory specific to fitness industry.
Such websites can be supported by an event management module, or a plugin for the purpose. Here, you can posts all the events that the fitness enthusiasts might find interesting.
Fitness center or Gym websites
These are simply the fitness websites to represent your fitness centers or gyms. The purpose of such websites is to build trust, be an online presence so the interested people can find the required information about your fitness institute online.
The fitness studios website will also have pages to describe your services, and serve other relevant information to the prospective clients. Such a website can offer online courses, email subscribe, and even host blogs about health & fitness.
Fitness Magazines & blogs
Generally maintained by personal trainers, or gym instructors, or simply by any kind of fitness enthusiasts or any one in general to write about health and fitness in general.
There can be text and video blogs about exercise, building muscle mass, workout videos, yoga, strength training, health and nutrition, life coaching, yoga routines, lifestyle blogs and how to maintain healthy body and weight.
Such a website can be built with different motives, either to build a community of fitness enthusiasts, promote some service or product related to fitness, share exercise & daily burn routines, workouts, or in association with a gym or fitness center to increase monthly membership.
eCommerce based Fitness website
There are great fitness websites that promote healthier lifestyle by selling products related to health, fitness & nutrition in general.
In the modern world, there are so many products that can help people achieve their health goals, for example: Supplements that supports building muscle, lose weight, or workout equipment, training books and manuals, or simply service packages.
Yoga Studio
Similar to gym or fitness center websites, yoga websites too can have multiple aims – to promote the yoga studios, or just as a part of an online campaign to make sure that a client searching for such services gets to know about yours with the help of a web search.
A great fitness website in general can be around one or more of the following subjects.
- Physical and mental fitness where you can talk about a healthy lifestyle as well as mental health
- Fitness tips for a healthier lifestyle
- A great fitness website to share healthy recipes
- Personal training tips
- Tips and tricks to lose weight or gain muscle mass
- Fitness articles of any kind
- Meal plans and exercises
- lifestyle or wellness related websites
- Life coaching, body and mind wellness
What is the best platform to build a Fitness Website?
Gone are the days when website building was a domain of the experts. Now you can build a great fitness website on your own, without involving programmers or web designers.
There are different platforms through which you can build your own website. They allow you to create variety of fitness websites without touching a line of code. So you can build a great fitness website for personal training, gym, yoga, nutrition, or any such services.
We recommend using WordPress to create any kind of websites because of the following reasons:
1)It is very easy to use
WordPress is one of the easiest to use CMS that you can build your website with. There are no overwhelming dashboard options or complex UI elements. Log in to the WordPress dashboard and you will see it is simple, with self explanatory options, menu and easy controls.
2)It is Free and open source
The cherry on the cake is that you can download and use WordPress to create a commercial website, absolutely free.
Of course, you will have to pay for hosting and domain name, and a premium WordPress theme. But all those costs combined will still be significantly lower than the monthly fee you may have to pay for SAAS website building platforms.
3)Themes & Plugins at your aid
WordPress is for all the technical as well as non-technical people to build their websites with. You can just pick one of these WordPress fitness themes to get started in minutes.
How to create a Fitness Website?
Since we recommend using WordPress for a fitness website, building a fitness site through WordPress will require you to follow the steps as below:
Get a good domain name
First of all, you should decide the name of your site. Yes, the domain name, but it is essentially the like the recognizer for your site on the internet.
Hosting service
When you use WordPress to create a fitness website, you will need to subscribe to a reliable host for publishing your website.
We recommend using a trustworthy hosting service like Bluehost for both, the hosting service as well as for acquiring the domain name.
A Fitness WordPress theme
Start with a good WordPress theme or template…
The gateway for creating a great fitness website is a good premium WordPress fitness theme fit for your purpose.
Unlike HTML templates that are meant for just designs, WordPress themes for gyms and personal trainers are a full package of features as well as design.
Plus, they are easy to use and very affordable. Moreover, you can easily change your websites theme whenever you want.
Install & customize your website
A WordPress theme for fitness or yoga or personal trainers will be like a ready to use website that you can easily edit and update with your own content.
And when you opt for a premium WordPress theme to create a website, you will be provided with a theme guide/documentation on how you can install and perform various customizations using the theme options.
Therefore, you can follow the instructions given in the theme guide and install and use the theme for creating a best fitness website.
Recommended features for your fitness websites
When it comes to website building, there are no set of rules on what can make a great fitness website. You can get as creative as you like, make use of the different theme features to create unique facilities on your site.
However, below listed are some of the salient features of a fitness website:
Details about your gym
To start with, if you are creating a website or your fitness center, yoga studio, gym, or fitness institute, you should be descriptive about your services, and give a clear insight to the prospective clients on what they can expect.
Responsive & mobile friendly interface
Your fitness websites should look good on any device it is viewed on. Choose a theme or template for your fitness website that is clean and looks great on devices different screen resolutions.
Besides that, the website should also be cross browser compatible in order to ensure that it is useful for everyone, regardless of the device they use to view your website.
High Quality Graphics & Content
Content is the king and it will always be. You should always make sure your website has the most informative content.
The format of content also matters, choose a clean design with great readability. Multi-media rich content is great for the visitors and can keep them interested for longer.
Intuitive & Modern design
The design of your website matters too. You should always choose a clutter free website with clean layouts, that highlights the content.
It should have a strategic design, with the website sections arranged logically and leading to more conversations with an effective Call-to-action section.
Good Page speed Insights
No ones likes a slow website. Especially when it your site’s fault.
Make sure you test your website’s pages using tools like Google Page speed insights and avoid using scripts that can unnecessarily slow down the page loading speed.
Including high quality images can also significantly reduce the page speed for which you can use some image optimizing tools.
Search engine optimized
There’s nothing as important as visibility of your website. one of the reasons why we recommend using WordPress for website building is because it is SEO optimized and supports a lot of tools, in form of WordPress plugins to create content that is good for SEO too.
Therefore, whatever platform you choose to create your fitness website, make sure it is SEO optimized.
Location & Contact information
If you own a gym, yoga studio, fitness or wellness center, then of course your website should include the physical address of your place.
If its is online, and you are just a personal trainer maintaining a fitness website to gain more clients, you should at least include your email address or contact information in any other form.
A great contact form & CTA
For fitness websites, the Call to Action is generally in the form of a contact form, or telephone number, or a newsletter sign up.
So make sure you make the best of the call to action sections by using persuasive copy, and attractive colors that can draw user attention and incite desired actions.
Reviews & Testimonials
Displaying reviews of your clients will help you build trust. This can make your services look significantly reliable in the eyes of new visitors.
You can ask your existing clients to leave you great testimonials as a goodwill gesture and use them on your website.
How to promote your website
The modern technologies and platforms make it easy for you to easily create a website for gym or personal training, but the difficult part is making sure that it get the desired traction.
There is no ideal plan or a ‘one size fits all’ strategy for promoting your websites for website builders. It’s always subjective. Promotional strategies may differ based on the following factors:
- The type of website – e-commerce, business, online directory, etc.
- operational area of your website
- Target audience
- Competitors
However, for a fitness website, you can use one of the below listed methods to promote your website.
1) Social media
Develop a social media plan to leverage the most popular social platforms to promote your fitness website.
The social media platforms are a great way to find ready made community of people with similar interests. Write posts, share videos and links, etc. You can either opt for free social media or invest in social media marketing using services like Facebook ads, Instagram business, and so on.
2) Google AdWords
This smart advertising service from Google will directly place your add where it finds the audience relevant to it.
Targeted advertising by Google will ensure that the advertisement for your fitness website is not shown randomly but only where is it sought for.
3) Sponsored advertisements
Make a list of all the websites or associate businesses in the town to promote your website on. For a fitness website, such businesses can be -the nutrition and fitness center of an eCommerce website, blogs that talk about health and fitness, or any website where you think your target audience can be found.
4) List on directories
For fitness websites, the local directories can help a lot. Especially when it is about a gym site, or fitness center website.
A directory website that has good traffic and is a reliable source of information for the people is a great alternative to promote your fitness website.
5) Guest blog/backlinks
One of the traditional ways to promote any kind of site, is through guest posting or outreach for obtaining the backlinks. You can reach out to certain sites that support guest posts, and create content for them.
There can be a paragraph or two about your fitness website, or you can link back through the author section. Or you can reach out to relevant websites and ask for a backlink where your page can add meaning.
6) SEO optimize your fitness websites
To obtain organic traffic and help your site’s visibility, you must always make sure that your fitness website is optimized for SEO.
This way you will be able to be listed as an organic result on the search engine results page. So the people using specific keywords related to your business can find you. You can either hire an SEO agency or optimize your own fitness website for SEO.
7) Word of mouth
This may seem like a bit over the top but yes, talk about your fitness website. Include your web address on your visiting card, or the banner for your gym or fitness center.
If it is a fitness website pertaining to blogs, you can try sharing the address with your friends and family and ask for support.
Maintaining Fitness Websites
Fitness websites, are unlike a directory site or an eCommerce site where you will need a lot of operations to be performed on day to day basis. Unless we are taking about fitness blog site, which will obviously require you to post content regularly.
Roughly, the following are some of the maintenance operations that your fitness website will require.
Update the content as and when required
Even though a fitness website may be a type of a business website which won’t require regular posting, or plenty of new pages and content everyday, you should always make sure that whatever content is on your website, is not outdated.
Removing the outdated and unnecessary content is as important as adding new content to your site. You should also keep a habit of changing the content/designs/images, by regularly updating your fitness website’s static pages so that the visitors don’t lose interest.
Replying to contact form queries
The contact forms are a way through which the visitors can easily reach you, and that is why replying to the queries that you receive through the contact form is important.
Regular cleanup
Keep your website clutter free. Always delete the unnecessary pages, remove the unused plugins, and make sure that the resources are only used by what is actively serving your visitors.
Updating the software
When you are using WordPress to build a fitness website, you will need to update the software whenever it is available. This includes both WordPress and the WordPress theme that you have used to build your fitness website.
If you are using plugins, then you can update them as well. Updates come with new features, bug fixes or any such necessary changes and are not recommended to be missed.
Backing up
Backups are like lifeboats when your site crashes. You can quickly pick the latest backup and get your website running without disappointing your visitors with a ‘page not found’ message.
Competitive Analysis
You can learn a lot if you keep an eye on your competitors. Of course you don’t have to copy them, but it can give you a brief idea on what is going on in the market and what is the content gap, or the service gap.
SEO
Search engine optimization is always a recurring task. Because the search engine algorithms are frequently updated to polish the user satisfaction regarding the search results. And you will have to make sure that your fitness website meets those standards.
A regular SEO audit and monitoring will help you ensure that your website is fit to perform well on search engines.
Moreover, the market trend, the competition, the change in user preference over time, will require you to re-evaluate your website’s strategy to stay in the race.
Tips & Tricks & Ideas for your Fitness websites
You can build a great website for fitness community, or a personal trainer, or yoga studio with WordPress.
However, when it comes to a best fitness website, you need to go out of your ways and offer something extra to keep your visitors interested.
Here are some tips that can help you reach your website’s goals.
Give them something for free
We all love free stuff, it’s always sweet if you have something to offer for free. It can be a diet plan, access to an online tool like a BMI calculator, a weight converter, exercise chart, nutrition calculator, a free download of eBook for diet or limited access to a membership plan.
Keep an active blog
This will be true in case you are maintaining a fitness blog site, but even if its a general fitness website to represent your gyms, CrossFit center, yoga studio or wellness center, maintaining blogs is always advantageous.
And what more, fitness websites can cover a lot in blogs. You can write about basic nutrition, community health, recommended workouts for people of different class like pregnant women, or someone who recently had a surgery, diet and workout tips for beginners, exercise or yoga tutorials, women health & nutrition, advantages of different yoga poses, tips for losing weight, fitness level exercise, and so on.
Focus on social media
You can do great by building an online fitness community through social media. An active community on social media can help you gain more clients and works great as a promotional strategy too.
Events Seminars
In physical space, you can organize events or seminars where you can invite people, or ask them to join to help them achieve their fitness goals.
Or alternatively, you can organize online streaming events. Such events will help you spread a word about your training programs and fitness website and engage a community.
Conclusion
Therefore, building and managing a fitness website is easy. You probably won’t need to hire staff to maintain and manage your website if you systematically perform the steps and keep updating it regularly.
All the pictures used in this article belong to our fitness WordPress theme, that comes with pre-designed sections specific to modern fitness websites. It is an Elementor based WordPress theme with drag and drop front end editing options so you don’t have to worry about the complex backend operations.
You can use this theme to create and manage professional looking fitness websites on your own.