How to Make a Fitness Calculator in WordPress

Want to make an online fitness calculator for your WordPress site? Learn how to make a BMI calculator in just a few steps!

Approximate read-time: 7 minutes

Want to learn how to make a fitness calculator for WordPress? Great idea!

If you work in the fitness or nutrition business, you're well aware of how competitive the industry is. To stay competitive, you'll need a website and lots of quality content.

It's a lot of work. But it's worth sweating over.... the fitness market is massive!

Statista has said that annual fitness revenue in the U.S. will be $18 billion as of 2020. If you want to get a piece of that action, you'll need to hustle.

In this article, we'll talk about what a fitness calculator can do for your business. Then, we'll show you how to build one in just a few easy steps.

Fitness calculators are great for WordPress sites

Want to stay competitive in today's world? Get your business online. Besides building your own website, you'll need some content & tools to attract an audience.

A fitness calculator could be just the right thing to engage the health-conscious crowd. Add a BMI calculator or a calorie counting calculator to your WordPress site. Users will love them!

You could also use a fitness calculator as a lead generation tool. Just set up your calculator to collect email addresses and you'll have a whole new stream of customers.

And once you have more contacts, you can automatically send them an email series with links to your fitness products & services. You'll be making money online in no time.

Using a fitness calculator to build communities

One way to get your entire fitness community engaged is to gamify fitness goals.

All you would need to do is create & publish some fitness calculators that tie-into user profiles. Then, people could use your fitness calculators to display their progress with pride in your community!

This is a great way to encourage engagement among your members. And if you run a WordPress community, you already know that engagement is the key to success.

If you're interested in starting your own WordPress community, we suggest going with our friends at MemberPress.

WordPress calculators are not just for fitness

And actually, there are many ways to use calculators on WordPress sites. One way: improve your fitness website with price calculators.

Price calculators add eCommerce to your site. Imagine empowering customers to build their own custom fitness plans.

Customers could select products & services they want, calculate total costs automatically, and pay for everything all from one WordPress form! The entire process can be automated - no need to sweat up a storm.

👉 Learn more: Best WordPress Membership Plugins

Why not use a fitness calculator plugin?

There are a lot of fitness calculator plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. Sure, you could use one of those, but here's why this isn't the best idea longterm:

• Site Speed: Fewer plugins means faster load times.
• Too Many HTTP Requests: Reduced site speed.
• Too Many Plugins: Increased potential for conflicts.

To keep your WordPress site trim, you want to install as few plugins as possible. Not sure how to consolidate your plugins? Here's a tip: one plugin to rule them all!

In this case, a WordPress form plugin could help. A form builder could create calculators, contact forms, and do a lot more. There are tons of ways to use forms in WordPress!

If you're totally new to WordPress forms, you could read our post on how to create a form. You'll see it's not that hard!

👉 Read more: 6 Ways to Use Calculators on WordPress Sites

Formidable Forms: fitness calculators + more

In this guide, we are going to show you how to use the premium version of our WordPress form builder plugin to make a fitness calculator. You'll need Formidable Pro to take advantage of the online calculator forms feature.

Formidable Pro also includes over a dozen calculator templates, including a BMI calculator and a Daily Calorie Intake calculator. It also includes other advanced form building features, like multi-step forms for example.

It's easy to get started. Plus, we've got a 14-day money-back guarantee too, so there's really no risk to give Formidable a try.

How to make a BMI calculator in WordPress

In this quick tutorial, we are going to show you how to make a BMI calculator for WordPress. It's one of the most common fitness calculators to offer your audience.

After you've downloaded & installed Formidable Pro, there are just a few more steps.

Step 1: Plan your BMI calculator

Before you create your BMI calculator, you'll have to answer this question: Imperial or Metric? Choosing the correct unit of measurement for your audience will increase the number of people who engage.

If you're like us, you'll choose both! This can be done by using Radio Buttons and Conditional Logic. That's how we set things up in our BMI calculator form template.

To keep things simple for this tutorial, let's go with the Metric system.

👉 Still want a plugin? The Best WordPress Calculator Plugins

Step 2: Add your form fields

The next thing to do is add our form fields:

1. Height (number field): A user's height in centimeters.
2. Weight (number field): A user's weight in kilograms.
3. BMI (number field): An output of the user's BMI.

Step 3: Configure basic field options

Now that we've added our fields, we need to configure our basic Field Options.

Height Field

Name your field to make things easier for your audience.  Alternatively, you can adjust the Placeholder Text and/or the Field Descriptions.

Weight Field

Same as above, name your fields. In this case, you could name your field as "Weight" and enter a field description of "Kilograms".

BMI Field

We put a field label of "BMI" and a field description of "Normal weight: 18.5 - 24.9" to give users a reference point.

Step 4: Configure advanced field options

Now we need to configure out advanced field options. In this case, we are going to be using Field Calculations. We only need to insert a calculation into our BMI field.

1. 1. Click on your BMI field and then click Advanced in the field options.
   2. Above the Default Value field, click on the calculator icon.
      
   3. Enter your BMI calculation into the default value field.

BMI is calculated by weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. Since our height field accepts centimeters, we need to divide by 100 to convert this to meters.

The formula in the math world would be written like this:

In Formidable, it's a little different. Here's the formula to copy and paste. You'll need to swap "76" with your weight Field ID and "75" with your height field ID:

[76] / Math.pow(([75] / 100), 2)

Now all you need to do is save your form by clicking the Update button in the top right corner of the screen.

Step 5: Publish your fitness calculator

You're almost done! Now all you need to do is publish your form. This couldn't be easier in Formidable:

1. Use the shortcode builder
2. Insert the form shortcode manually
3. Use a WordPress form block

Not sure what a shortcode is? They are easy to spot because they are always wrapped in square brackets [like this].

Your new fitness calculator will have a shortcode that can be found by accessing the Settings tab just above the form builder area. You just need to take this shortcode and place it into any post or page on your WordPress site.

Wrapping up

That's pretty much all there is to it. Now your audience can measure their BMI. This simple fitness tool could grow into something very powerful for your website... or something even more powerful for your MemberPress fitness community!

For more WordPress guides, tips & tricks, follow the Formidable blog. Until next time, keep sweating!

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Unless you are still sweating to the oldies, you are going to need a WordPress calculator plugin. Get started risk-free with our free plugin or the full-featured pro version of Formidable Forms.