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How to Make a Gym Website in WordPress (Step by Step)

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Do you want to make a gym website in WordPress?

Your potential clients are looking for a quality gym like yours, but if you don’t have a website, they’ll end up at your competitor’s doorstep instead. Making a gym website on WordPress is the easiest way to promote your business online and get more customers.

In this step-by-step guide, we will show you how to easily make a gym website using WordPress.

Step by step guide on making a gym website

What Should You Include on a Gym Website?

Before we dive into the nitty gritty details of building your attractive 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 your first impression for potential customers, so you’ll want to make it count. 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 a more healthy place. 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.

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’ve got quotes or ratings from Yelp, you’ll want to add rotating testimonials on this page as well.

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 or our best themes for fitness blogs.

With that being said, 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:

Online Store

Not every gym website needs an online store. That said, most workout facilities sell physical products as well, 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 where you can add functionality to your store to boost your average order value and reduce cart abandonment rates.

Check out our list of the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.

With that said, let’s jump into how to make a gym website in WordPress.

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.

Clicking the Get Started Now button in the Bluehost page

This will bring you to Bluehost’s pricing page.

If you’re not sure which one to use, new users usually pick the Basic or Choice Plus plans. You can always upgrade to a higher plan if needed later on.

Bluehost pricing plans

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.

Bluehost buy domain name

If you need help, take a look at our tips on how to choose the best domain name. Then, click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.

From here, you will 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 if needed.

Bluehost package extras

Finally, enter your payment details to complete the purchase.

Bluehost will 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.

Login to WordPress by click on the Edit Site button in Bluehost

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’ll 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.

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 that will 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.

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.

Customize your WordPress theme

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.

Editing a gym website using the Full Site Editor

Method 2. Make Your Own Custom Theme for Your Gym Website (No Coding)

For this method, you’ll need the SeedProd plugin. It is the best WordPress page builder and theme builder plugin for WordPress and allows you to easily create a completely custom gym website theme.

Over 1.5 million websites use SeedProd to build better-looking websites. There is a free version of SeedProd, but to get full features, you’ll need the Pro version.

SeedProd comes with a bunch of starter theme template kits that you can use as a starting point, or you can start with a blank canvas and create a theme from scratch.

SeedProd starter themes

It comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder.

You can drag blocks from the left column onto the page to add common web design elements to your layouts.

SeedProd theme builder

Every block is easy to customize by simply clicking on it.

You can change colors, background, height, width, and other properties of any element on your website.

Edit theme

For more details, see our tutorial on how to create a custom WordPress theme from scratch.

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 to 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, which is the best WordPress form builder on the market.

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.

Gym registration form

You can even turn on recurring payments.

This will automatically charge members when their membership expires.

Enable recurring payments

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. Over 6 million websites use WPForms.

Make a Gym Membership Website with MemberPress

MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin. It allows you to easily sell online memberships with recurring payments.

It gives you more flexible membership options, like discounts, trial memberships, different subscription levels, and more.

MemberPress

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, workout sheets, and more.

Creating subscription plans for gym membership

MemberPress works with all top email marketing services, payment gateways, and other WordPress plugins that you may already be using.

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 like gym clothing, accessories, health & fitness equipment, and more.

Selling gym merchandise online

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.

This 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 put in place, the next step is to start promoting your website.

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 the 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 is 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 currently 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 is 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 and 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.

  1. Healthworks Fitness
Healthworks Fitness

Healthworks Fitness runs 20+ fitness centers for women. Their website uses a minimalist design with clear call-to-action buttons.

2. Tonal

Tonal

Tonal is a smart home gym company. Their website showcases a large video header showcasing their flagship product in action.

3. Anytime Fitness

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 helped you easily make a gym website in WordPress. 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.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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