The right approach to designing a website for a health and fitness business is the same approach to creating a workout program for a client who wants to stay healthy and fit.
It’s not just about how you look; it’s also about how you feel. You could be 20 pounds lighter, but if you can’t pick up 20-pound objects off the floor, you could be healthy—but not fit.
You can have a website that wows users with its images, colors, and font styles – but if it takes 30 seconds for a page to load, the buttons don’t work, and they have to zoom in to view its contents on their mobile phones – they’ll leave and never come back.
An effective health and fitness program makes a client look and feel good, and an effective web design makes users happy and productive.
In this article, we’ll show you how to design a website that will take your career in the health and fitness industry to the next level.
Why Do You Need a Website for Your Health and Fitness Business?
The health and fitness industry can be competitive. In 2019, there were an estimated 64 million gym memberships in the United States. Although 35% of gym-goers stopped going to a commercial gym after the pandemic, 70% of Americans invested in home gym equipment.
The shift in exercise venues from commercial to home gyms created a demand for online personal training services. In 2019, only 7% of Americans were exercising to live-stream workout classes. In 2020, the percentage of Americans participating in live-stream workout classes grew to 85%.
Globally, the health and fitness industry is expected to grow 7.7% annually from 2020 to 2024, and its revenues are estimated to hit $96.6 billion in 2024.
If you own a gym business, are a personal trainer, coach, health educator, fitness equipment manufacturer, athletic director, physical therapist, or nutritionist, you’ll need a website to promote your products and services. A website will help build your brand by allowing you to share your knowledge, highlight your career accomplishments, and, most importantly, tell your fitness journey.
A website will keep you on the race and at pace with other health and fitness professionals flexing their online muscles to get more clients. If you don’t have a website, it’s not too late to have one. With the right design elements for your health and fitness website, you can outlift, outlast, and outrun the competition!
A Step-by-Step Guide On How To Design A Health And Fitness Website
If your client’s fitness journey starts with defining his goals, designing your health and fitness website starts with defining your business.
1. Define Your Business
In the fitness world, there are personal trainers, coaches, consultants, retailers, and scientists. These professionals can be further defined by specialization, experience, and credentials. For example, some personal trainers specialize in general fitness or designing rehabilitation programs for the elderly and injured athletes.
You have experienced and credentialed coaches in strength and conditioning, bodybuilding, and sport-specific training. Some personal trainers and coaches are licensed doctors, nutritionists, and sports scientists.
Define your business by defining who you are.
- Why did you get into health and fitness?
- What are your skills?
- What are your accomplishments in sports?
- What are your credentials?
- How will you share your knowledge, experience, and expertise with clients?
- What are your expectations of this website?
- What are your business goals for the website?
- How much do you expect to earn?
- What streams of income can the website create for you?
For the last question, a website can create income opportunities for you in many ways.
- Create a Members Only Page. Subscribers can choose among 3 to 4 monthly packages priced according to offerings. These include online training, health and performance assessment, a few face-to-face training sessions, and scheduled consultations.
- Sell Training Programs. Create customized training programs in PDF or spreadsheet format based on the client’s age, gender, and fitness level.
- Sell Merchandise. Create cool designs for T-shirts, caps, shorts, tank tops, shaker bottles, and other standard gym items.
- Affiliate Marketing. Contact suppliers and vendors in the fitness industry and ask if you can promote and sell their products on your website. You can sell supplements, pre-packed food, and gym memberships.
- Ad Placements. If your traffic has grown to enviable levels, businesses will contact you and ask if they can place ads on your website.
If you consistently produce and distribute high-quality content, people will be motivated to contact you and inquire about your services. The website becomes your calling card on the Internet. It’s where they can find you and learn more about what you can do for them.
2. Get Inspired By Other Websites
Ask yourself these questions:
- What fitness websites do you frequently visit?
- Why do you like these websites?
- What features make these websites better than others?
- Do you like the content of these websites?
- Do you recommend these websites to clients and friends?
Come up with a list of your five favorite fitness websites. Schedule at least one hour of studying each website on the list. On a piece of paper, write down design elements, built-in features, and content pieces that immediately stand out and grab your attention.
Read comments on the website, their social media pages, and community forums pertaining to each website’s looks and functionalities. Find out their strongest and weakest points as identified by site users.
Test and evaluate the performance of each website.
- Did the website clearly load on your mobile phone?
- How fast did the website load on your mobile phone?
- What are the key features of each website?
- Is it accessible by other browsers?
- Are the buttons working properly?
- Are the contact forms easy to use and understand?
- Can you share the content easily?
- Do the images – colors, pictures, and graphics – appeal to you?
- Are there videos on the website?
- Does the website have an e-portal?
- Is the e-portal working properly?
- Are the product and service descriptions clearly articulated?
Once you’ve gone over your findings, ask yourself this question?
“Can I build a better health and fitness website?”
If the answer is “Yes”, read on!
3. Manifest Your Vision for the Website
Former California Governor and movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger said that when he was bodybuilding, he would imagine his muscles growing while training. In his mind, Arnold knew how he wanted to look and focused on body parts that needed more size and shape.
After defining your business and taking inspiration from other fitness websites, you must have a clearer vision of how you want your website to look and function. List your ideas for your health and fitness website on a word processor or paper.
Here are a few things you might want to think about:
- What is the name of your website?
- What will your business logo look like?
- What is your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) or the quality that distinguishes you from the competition?
- What is your slogan?
- Which pages would feature your image?
- Would you have a blog page? (Spoiler alert: YES!)
- Would you want a members-only page?
- Would the home page feature a video?
- What are the two predominant colors of your website?
- What are your Calls-to-Action (CTA)?
- How many contact forms would the website have?
- How would you write the About Us page?
- Would your website have an e-portal?
- Do you want a chat plugin?
- Can you get testimonials from your clients?
You don’t have to be a professional web designer to manifest your vision for the website. Create a concept on paper. Identify the locations of the logo, the UVP, the images, the client testimonials, the CTA buttons, and the explainer video on the home page.
Now that your vision for your website is becoming clearer, it’s time to take the next step.
4. Hire a Professional Web Designer
Everyone has an idea of how they want their first home to look like. They know they want the kitchen to have an industrial look and feel. The living room must be minimalist, with many wide open spaces. The dining room will feature a mix of wood and glass furniture to exude a rustic charm.
All ideas sound great, but you must bring in a licensed architect or interior designer to know if they’ll work or come out fine. Similarly, you must hire a professional web designer for a website.
The professional web designer will take your input, analyze it, and give suggestions guided by years of acquiring knowledge and experience designing websites.
For sure, the professional web designer will tell you the ten essential qualities of an effective website:
- Mobile-responsive design
- Fast download speed
- Optimized for search engines
- Fully-functioning buttons and links
- High-quality content
- Top-level security
- Easy to navigate
- Powerful and compelling CTAs
- Structured data
- Excellent User Experience
You can have a website that looks good, but it won’t deliver the desired results if it doesn’t possess any of these ten essential qualities of an effective website. A professional web designer has the technical skills and the ideal attributes to design the best website for a health and fitness website.
Contact us now, and let’s get started!
5. Transform Your Vision Into Mockups
One of the best things about being a professional web designer is presenting mockups to clients. A mockup is a static model of how a website or web page will look when it’s ready for launch. It’s a visual rendering of the client’s vision transformed into a web page.
Clients love it!
They become excited because their vision is coming to life; it’s becoming a reality. For months, sometimes years, the concept of a website is just a hodgepodge of ideas. It has no form or substance.
The mockup clearly depicts how the website will look after combining all the ideas.
It’s not always a home run. As the client reviews the mockup, moments of clarity trigger new ideas.
“I think we should do this…”
“It might be better to use a different image or color…”
“Let’s try to move this section over here…”
This is the feedback mechanism at work, and it’s an important component of ensuring the website’s success. The client tells us what he wants. However, as professional web designers, we must tell the client whether his suggestions will help or hinder the website’s performance.
For example, a client might want a video on the home page and a vanishing slide that features testimonials from his customers.
We know from experience that having a video and a vanishing slide could slow down the website. Both are high-impact visuals that could distract the site user and impede the effectiveness of the other.
Instead, we would suggest embedding a video from the client’s YouTube channel and presenting the testimonials as a static feature near the bottom of the home page.
Embedding a video will use less memory because we’re connecting to the server of YouTube. We can also create a separate landing page for the client testimonials to give them more attention.
6. Run Tests on Your Website
We don’t want your website to crash and burn when launched. Before we turn the website over to you, we’ll run tests on four key areas of design:
- Web Design:
- Page loading speed
- Navigability
- Mobile-responsiveness
- Browser compatibility
- Web Development
- Live URL – Switching from staging to production
- Page crawling
- Searching for 404 Error pages
- Analyze the size of images for possible compression
- SEO
- Title tags
- Metadata
- XML Sitemap
- HTML Sitemap
- Schema markup
- Network Administration
- Basic monitoring checks to ensure pages are working
- Site backup capability
- Traffic load tests
- SSL Certificates
- Security Protocols – Malware protection and firewalls
- Content Writing
- Content optimization
- Errors in spelling and grammar
- SERP Intent
We orient the client on these tests and why they are essential for the website’s successful launch. The test results will identify areas and features that need improvement.
Conclusion
If you’re out of shape, in poor health, and reeking of cigarette smoke, do you think clients will sign up with you?
It won’t matter what you accomplished in the fitness industry. If you don’t look healthy and fit, no one will hire your services because focusing on health and fitness isn’t just for beach season. It’s for life.
Similarly, people won’t sign up for your services if your website looks drab and doesn’t function properly. For the health and fitness industry, a website that looks good and performs optimally will encourage clients to sign up.
A website opens many income opportunities for you. It’s not an expense. A website is an investment in your career.
Setting up a members-only page allows you to offer online coaching. Incorporating an e-portal lets you sell products. Selling e-books about fitness and customized training programs can build your brand and enhance your reputation in the industry.
You can do all these while holding down a day job at a gym or office. The difference is that unlike a gym or an office, the website doesn’t close down. It’s open 24/7 and accessible to anyone worldwide with Internet service.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s build your health and fitness website now! Like an exercise plan, it’s never too late to start. All you have to do is take that first step.
And if you enjoyed this article, share it with your friends and clients in the fitness industry.
