An Overview
Fitness websites like Bodybuilding.com collect up a lot of traffic. The number of daily visitors goes beyond a staggering number of 1 million. They offer tons of articles and tutorial videos, diet plans, exercise programs, weight-training tips, and much more. They also sell food supplements and pieces of gym equipment. Some of their professional trainers invite their members to join various fitness programs and organize many group events as well. So it is evident that having an end-to-end fitness website can bring you a great deal of traffic and sales. But creating a fitness website with WooCommerce alone is just not enough. It doesn’t have the necessary features to help you out. And so, you would require additional plugins and tools to do that.Plugins you need
Every WordPress-based website needs a few plugins to give it shape and keep everything moving. In your case, you need plugins that suit your fitness needs and its applications. Here are the necessary plugins that you’d be needing for your website. Keep in mind that you can choose any other shipping plugin depending on your choice.Things you need to do
So once you are done with the plugin installations, you would need a roadmap in order to build a website. It should help you have a clear picture of what your website would look like. Here’s a basic list of things you’ll be doing.- Set up a WooCommerce store for your website
- Set up a shipping system to sell fitness items like supplements, workout accessories, workout equipment, etc.
- Set up a booking system for your classes, sessions, etc.
- Set up a blog to offer workout plans like weight-loss plans, build muscle plans, gain strength plans, etc.
- Set up a community or forum
Note: For the sake of making this guide universal, we will cover only the basic things. So if you feel like adding or removing something then feel free to do that. It’s your website.
Step 1: Set up your WooCommerce
The first step is to build yourself a WooCommerce website. For that, you need to set up WordPress and then apply a theme to give your website a good look. Though it’s always good to apply a beautiful theme, you should not spend much time doing that. That’s because most fitness websites are simple-looking and don’t usually have a ton of animations going around. So having a theme that has a few good solid colors can really give your website a professional feel to it. Now that you have WordPress and the choice of your theme installed on it, you have to now set up WooCommerce. Here are the necessary steps:- Install WooCommerce – WooCommerce will be an important part of your website. It will handle most of your payments, orders, bookings and much more. Check out this WooCommerce tutorial to learn more.
- Create pages for the website – WooCommerce has four default pages – Shop, Cart, Checkout and My Account. After installing the plugin you need to go to the Pages section under the Dashboard. Under this section, you can make necessary changes to your pages like changing the name, changing the parent page, etc.
- Set up Checkout and Payments – This is one of the most important parts of setting up the WooCommerce plugin on your website. That’s because it largely impacts your customer behavior.
- Set up Currency and Store location – After setting up your checkout and payment options, you need to define the currency and your store location.
- Add products and configure the settings – Since you are going to sell items on your website, you need to define and set up your products.
Step 2: Set up a shipping system
Once you are done setting up your WooCommerce, you have to now set up the WooCommerce Royal Mail Shipping Plugin with Tracking. To do that, you need to buy this plugin first and then use the installation and activation article to install it on your WooCommerce. You need to make sure that the Currency is in Pound Sterling and the Weight and Dimensions are in the units of kg and cm. In order to change the currency, you need to go to WooCommerce > Settings and then change the currency to Pound Sterling. Once you are done with it, you need to go to WooCommerce > Settings > Products and then mention the units as kg and cm.



Step 3: Set up a bookings system
Now it’s time to have your fitness classes or sessions put up on the website. The idea here is that any one of your customers should be able to book their time slot for the fitness session. Some fitness websites even allow their clients to choose their desired workout hours. So they can come to the gym within that time period only.
Let’s try to add a Dance Fitness Program where customers can find a class and book the desired one for the time period. They will have the choice to mention the number of people joining that particular class. That’s because many people like going together with their friends, and they look up to classes that allow multiple entries.Define the class and set up bookings for it
Now let us assume that you operate between 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM every day. Each one of your classes lasts for an hour. You also take two breaks in between those classes for 1 hour each.






Step 4: Set up a blog
It is really important to have articles on your website. It increases the overall engagement and even has the power to convince customers to make a purchase. You can hire good writers to write, create images, offers, etc., for your blog. Another good thing about having a fitness-related articles is that people tend to share them with their friends and family. This can indirectly increase the incoming traffic and eventually may get you even more customers. Although the Blog section offered by WordPress is powerful enough to write and manage your articles, there’s a lot you can do to generate more traffic around it. And for that, you need to make your articles visible across your website. There are several good plugins that can help you with it. Here are some of the best options for you.Jetpack

WordPress Popular Posts

Step 5: Set up a community or forum
People seek out advice and tips related to fitness. Having a community on your website can really help them out. They can come down to the community page, share their experience, and also may help out others. You and your fitness instructors can also join the community in order to increase even more engagement. So it should be obvious by now that running a fitness website does call out for the need for a community. There are some really good WordPress plugins that can help you build a decent community. Here are two plugins that are quite popular.BuddyPress

UltimateMember
