6 Tips for Your Fitness Website

Creating a fitness website can be time consuming and expensive. But, a well-designed website can also be a major source of potential members for your business if you do it right. Recently, I sat down with Tim Coe, Zen Planner’s Web Development Manager, to find out more information about creating a website that is both secure and engaging. Here are six fitness website tips to boost your sites performance.

1). SSL Compliance

One of the most important pieces of creating a secure website is making sure that it is SSL compliant. The best way to check this is to view your URL and confirm that it includes “https://” at the beginning, rather than just “http://”. If your website isn’t secure, Google will alert potential visitors and most likely draw them away from viewing. An SSL can cost between $50 – $350 per year on its own, but we include them on any of Zen Planner’s integrated websites.

2). Mobile-Friendly

As we shift to a more mobile-centric world you’ll find that website traffic is more likely to come from an iPhone or Android than a standard desktop. This shift has lead Google to switch its rankings to what is called “Mobile First Indexing“. Which means that if your website is not mobile optimized, you’re going to take a big hit in your rankings. One of the biggest factors that can drag your fitness website rankings down is your bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percent of people coming to a page and then immediately leaving the website.  Reasons for high bounce rates can include poor-looking embeds, a page that’s hard to scroll through, or ill-formatted text. The best way to test this is to just pull out a phone and head to your website through the browser.

Want to Learn More? Check out our Webinar Why Your Business Needs a Modern Website

3). Great Looking Embeds

Running Zen Planner through your website is easy but making sure that your embeds blend with the background can be tricky. Embeds should look like an organic part of your website, even though they’re actually pulling data from another website. Items like your Zen Planner calendar, membership options, and retail store can all be integrated into your website.

4). Calls to Action

Having Calls to Action (CTA’s) on your website is crucial for getting your traffic to convert to leads or members. Most CTA’s are buttons or links with short, punchy action words like “Register Here” or “Start Now”. Clicking on one of these CTA’s will bring the user to a sign-up page or questionnaire. In the fitness industry, the highest conversion rates come from CTA’s promoting some kind of free trial.

5). Contact Info

What do you do when you are looking to contact a new business for info? Chances are you take out your phone, type the company name into a browser and look for their contact info. Which is why it is so important to make it as easy as possible for people to find your email and phone. The best way to do this is to make sure that this information is visible above the fold (the part of the webpage that is visible without scrolling). These should also be clickable links, so mobile visitors can call you with the tap of a button.

6). Site Speed

It’s important that your website loads fast. Your visitors have a short attention span with browsing a prospective gym. Site speed is also a ranking factor for Google so you should aim for a loading speed of under three seconds. You can test this by right-clicking and using the “Inspect Element” feature in your browser, or by visiting pingdom.com.

Zen Planner websites check each one of these boxes, creating a secure and engaging online space for your members. Just something to keep in mind if you’re having trouble getting website-driven leads or are having trouble managing your existing website. We’d love to show you more of what are websites can do for your fitness business. Sign up for a quick demo or find more information here!