Potential clients are on the hunt for a quality gym like yours, but without a website, they might end up at your competitor’s doorstep instead. This is why having an online presence is super important for any business, and gyms are no exception.
Creating a gym website using WordPress is the easiest way to promote your business online and attract more customers. The user-friendly platform offers a wide range of themes and plugins specifically designed for gyms, making showcasing your services, schedule, and client testimonials easier.
Throughout our 16 years at WPBeginner, we’ve helped many businesses, including those in the health and wellness sector, establish and grow their online presence. So, we understand the unique needs and challenges of creating a website tailored specifically for a gym.
In this step-by-step guide, we will show you how to create a gym website using WordPress.
What Should You Include on a Gym Website?
Before we dive into the nitty gritty details of building your attractive gym website, it’s important to know what it should include.
Here are some pages and elements that you’ll want to have to enhance the user experience and increase conversions.
Homepage
The homepage is potential customers’ first impression, so you’ll want to make it count. You can ask yourself: what’s the first impression you want to make, and how should new visitors perceive your brand?
For example, a high-end gym may offer highly luxurious services like elite trainers, nutrition consultations, spa services, and personalized training sessions. On the flip side, a budget-friendly gym will prioritize its message to talk about the affordability of its membership plans.
Be sure to throw in an image gallery that highlights pictures of your fitness classes or even your friendly team.
Services Page
Your services page should outline all the services you provide. That includes:
- Membership plans and tier levels
- Personalized training programs
- Group fitness classes
- Nutritional consultations
You can also add any special services that your specific gym may offer, such as injury rehabilitation, massage and spa, etc.
If you accept monthly payments for gym memberships online, you’ll want to create a WordPress membership site and use a payment plugin that automatically charges recurring payments. That way, users can easily log into the portal, make changes to their membership plans, or make payments as needed.
To add to that, you’ll want to install a WordPress appointment and booking plugin. This will allow you to display your available timeslots for in-person classes, in-person personal training services, or consultation services.
You can add a contact form here and a call to action button for visitors to book your services.
About Page
Your customers go to the ‘About’ page to learn more about what you do, who you are, and why you do it.
You may want to talk about why you started a gym in the first place and your mission statement.
Maybe you’ve gone through your own fitness journey and vow to make your community healthier. On top of that, you can talk about your experience and qualifications to help build trust with potential clients.
Testimonials Page
As a gym owner, you have to get into the minds of your customers. Sure, things like fancy equipment, good location, and membership fees are important.
But nothing sells more than before and after transformation photos, especially in the fitness industry. These awe-inspiring pictures work as social proof, showcasing the results you and your team can provide.
You can also use this page to brag about what makes your gym special. Is it the world-class trainers? Maybe it’s the personalized coaching and small class sizes. Whatever it is, this is the place to talk about it.
If you have quotes or ratings from Yelp, you’ll definitely want to add rotating testimonials on this page as well. This will reinforce your gym’s credibility and build trust with potential clients.
Blog
Just about every website should have a blog. The more content you create, the more chances you have at ranking for specific keyword phrases.
Assuming you do proper keyword research, these are the exact queries that your ideal customers would be searching for. For instance, as a gym, you may want to rank for phrases like ‘best gym memberships in [location]’ or ‘free trial gym sessions.’
If you want to learn more, read our in-depth guide on how to start a WordPress blog and our expert picks of the best themes for fitness blogs.
Online Store
Not every gym website needs an online store. That said, most workout facilities also sell physical products, such as protein shakes, athleisure apparel, workout accessories, equipment, supplements, and more.
If you want the easiest way to build an online store, we recommend WooCommerce. It offers an entire ecosystem of apps that allow you to add functionality to your store to boost your average order value and reduce cart abandonment rates.
To expand your online store’s functionality, you might want to check out our list of the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.
With that in mind, here are the steps to making a gym website in WordPress. Feel free to use our links to jump to any step of the process:
Ready? Let’s jump right in.
Step 1: Deciding on a Gym Website Platform
There are many different website platforms that you can use to create a gym website, but your success entirely depends on choosing the right one.
WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder. It powers more than 43% of all websites on the internet, including thousands of gyms and health and fitness-related businesses.
Now, there are two types of WordPress available.
First, there is WordPress.com, which is a blog hosting service, and then you have the free WordPress.org software, which is also called self-hosted WordPress.
We recommend the WordPress.org software because it gives you full freedom and flexibility to build and grow your gym website. For more details, see our guide on the difference between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org.
To get started with WordPress, you will need a domain name and a WordPress hosting account.
A domain name is what your users will type in their browser to find your website (e.g., wpbeginner.com), and a hosting account is where your website files will be stored.
Normally, a domain name costs $14.99 per year, and web hosting starts from $7.99 per month (usually paid yearly).
Now, that’s a significant investment, particularly when you are just starting out.
Luckily, the folks at Bluehost have agreed to offer WPBeginner users a free domain name with a generous discount on hosting. Basically, you can get started for as little as $1.99 per month.
Simply visit the Bluehost website using our link and click on the green ‘Get Started Now’ button.
This will bring you to Bluehost’s pricing page.
If you’re unsure which one to use, new users usually choose the ‘Basic’ or ‘Choice Plus’ plans. You can always upgrade to a higher plan if needed later on.
Simply click ‘Select’ on a plan to move on to the next screen.
From here, you’ll be asked to choose a domain name for your website.
If you need help, take a look at our tips on how to choose the best domain name. Then, you can click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
On the next screen, you’ll see some package extras to add to your hosting account. We recommend unchecking all of them to save extra costs. You can always add them later as your needs grow.
Finally, you can enter your payment details to complete the purchase.
Bluehost should now send you an email to the address you provided during the signup. This email will have login details for accessing your web hosting control panel.
When logging in to the Bluehost control panel, go ahead and navigate to the ‘Websites’ tab. You will notice that Bluehost has automatically installed WordPress for you.
Simply click on the ‘Edit Site’ button to access your new WordPress website’s admin area.
Congratulations, you have successfully set up WordPress and are now ready to customize your gym website!
Step 2. Choosing a Design for Your Gym Website
The next step is to choose a design and layout for your gym website.
We will show you two ways to customize the design of your gym website. You can choose one that works best for you.
Method 1. Choose a WordPress Theme For Your Gym Website
WordPress themes control the design and layout of your website, and there are thousands of free and paid themes to choose from.
However, this abundance of choices makes it a bit overwhelming for beginners to pick a theme for their gym website. A good starting point would be our showcase of the best WordPress themes for gym websites.
You can also look at our pick of the most popular WordPress themes. All of them can be easily used for a gym website.
Now, here are a few tips to help you pick the best design for your website:
- Go for a simple design. Simplicity makes your design more versatile and easy to adapt to your requirements.
- Test the theme demo for website speed to make sure that it won’t slow down your website.
- Look at the theme demo on mobile devices to make sure it looks equally good on smaller screens. You’ll want to use a responsive theme to ensure excellent user experience across devices.
After choosing a theme, you will need to customize your WordPress theme to make it fit your gym website.
For most themes, you can simply go to the ‘Theme Customizer’ to start setting up your WordPress theme. The available customization options will be different depending on the theme.
You can learn more about how to use the Theme Customizer in our article.
If you use a non-block theme, then you will have to use the ‘Full Site Editor.’ It works like the Gutenberg block editor for editing pages and posts but for your entire theme.
You can read more about the topic in our complete guide to WordPress Full Site Editing.
Method 2. Make Your Own Custom Theme for Your Gym Website (No Coding)
For this method, you’ll need the SeedProd plugin. It’s the best WordPress page builder and theme builder plugin for WordPress which allows you to create a completely custom gym website theme easily.
Note: SeedProd has a free version. But the Pro plan offers the complete theme builder features, as well as access to all website kits and templates.
SeedProd comes with a bunch of starter theme template kits that you can use as a starting point. That said, you also have the option to start with a blank canvas and create a theme from scratch.
It comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder.
On its editor, you can drag blocks from the left column onto the page to add common web design elements to your layouts.
Every block is easy to customize by simply clicking on it.
You can change any element’s colors, background, height, width, and other properties on your website.
For more details, you can see our tutorial on how to create a custom WordPress theme from scratch.
Expert Tip: Want to leave your website design to the experts? Our team can create an attractive, completely custom website for your gym or fitness center. Check out our WPBeginner Design Services today!
Step 3. Adding Features to Your Gym Website
The best thing about WordPress is the ability to install plugins.
Think of plugins as apps for your website. You can add them to your website to extend its functionality and add new features.
Depending on how you want to run your gym business online, there are plenty of business plugins that help you get more new customers and even sell merchandise or memberships online.
Let’s check out some of the common features most gym websites use to run their business online.
Add a Gym Membership Form to Your Website
As a gym website, you may want users to be able to sign up and register for their gym membership online.
To do that, you’ll need WPForms, one of the best and most popular WordPress form builders on the market, with over 6 million users worldwide.
It allows you to easily create any kind of form using a simple drag-and-drop tool. You can create a membership registration form and accept online payments using PayPal, Stripe, or Authorize.net.
You can even turn on recurring payments.
This will automatically charge members when their membership expires.
Plus, WPForms connects to popular email marketing platforms, which allows you to easily send email newsletters to your members.
There’s also a free version of WPForms available that you can use to create simple online forms.
Make a Gym Membership Website with MemberPress
MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin. It allows you to sell online memberships with recurring payments easily.
This plugin also offers more flexible membership options, such as discounts, trial memberships, different subscription levels, and more.
You can add educational resources to your gym website as well.
For example, you can sell online courses for your fitness plans, allow fitness coaches to sell classes online, and offer members-only content like video lessons and workout sheets.
MemberPress works with all top email marketing services, payment gateways, and other WordPress plugins you may already use.
For more details, see our tutorial on how to make a membership website with WordPress.
Install WooCommerce to Sell Gym Merchandise
Want to add an online store to your gym website? WooCommerce is the world’s biggest eCommerce platform, and it runs on top of WordPress.
With WooCommerce, you can easily sell merchandise such as gym clothing, accessories, health and fitness equipment, and more.
WooCommerce supports PayPal, Stripe, and dozens of other payment services. It also has features to help you with inventory management, shipping, taxes, and more.
For more detailed instructions, see our tutorial on how to start an online store for beginners.
There you have it! You’ve set up all of your gym site’s necessities, which brings us to the next step in our tutorial.
Step 4. Promoting Your Gym Website
Now that you have set up your gym website and everything is in place, the next step is to start promoting it.
Luckily, WordPress gives you access to all the best tools to easily grow your business by promoting your website.
Following are a few tools that will quickly put you on the right track to success.
- All in One SEO for WordPress – All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and helps you get more free traffic to your website from search engines. Here’s a link to the free version of AIOSEO.
- OptinMonster – Once users are on your website, you want them to become gym members, sign up, or get in touch. This is where OptinMonster comes in to help you convert website visitors into customers.
- PushEngage – It’s the best web push notification platform on the market. It allows you to show targeted push notifications to your users on mobile and desktop devices even when they are not visiting your website.
- Smash Balloon – For many gym sites, social media like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook quickly help you build a large following. Smash Balloon helps you build a strong social media following using your WordPress website.
- MonsterInsights – It’s the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and allows you to see where your users are coming from and what’s working on your site to improve your conversions and sales. Here’s a link to the free version of MonsterInsights.
Examples of Gym Websites Made With WordPress
As you work on your gym website, you may want to draw some inspiration from other gym websites.
You can check what strategies they are using to sell more memberships and grow their business. After that, you can try similar strategies for your own gym business.
Let’s take a look at some gym websites for inspiration.
Healthworks Fitness runs 20+ fitness centers for women. Their website uses a minimalist design with clear call-to-action buttons.
Tonal is a smart home gym company. Their website features a large video header showcasing their flagship product in action.
Anytime Fitness runs gyms at several locations. Their website uses a clean layout with lots of bold colors, fonts, and calls to action.
We hope this guide has helped you make a gym website in WordPress. Next, you may also want to see our guide on how to create a fitness tracker in WordPress and the best WordPress themes for CrossFit gyms.
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