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Ryan Cordoni / Last Updated January 11, 2023

How to Create a Fitness Tracker in WordPress

Are you a fitness buff running a community site? This step-by-step guide will show you how to make a fitness tracker for your WordPress website.

Create a Fitness Tracker in WordPress

Approximate read time: 8 minutes

Looking for a way to take your fitness website to the next level? 

With a WordPress fitness tracker, you can inspire & motivate your audience to achieve their goals!

Let's face it: the online fitness community is competitive. With many websites to choose from, you need exciting content to stand out from the crowd.

As a health and fitness enthusiast, here's something you should know: no pain, no gain.

Formidable Forms is the best WordPress Form Builder plugin. Get it for free!
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But in this article, we'll show you how to easily create a fitness tracker for your WordPress site!

Here's what we'll cover:

  • Why create a WordPress fitness tracker?
    • What kinds of fitness trackers are there?
    • Who can benefit from creating a fitness tracker?
    • Create a WordPress fitness tracker in 5 steps

      Once we get through some of the basics, we will show you how to make a simple weight loss tracker, step by step. Let's get into it!

      Why create a WordPress fitness tracker?

      Build community with a fitness tracker in WordPress

      If you want to generate a loyal following & get tons of traffic to your WordPress site, a fitness tracker can help tremendously.

      When it comes to exercise, you know that success is born from consistency. Everybody wins if your users can track their fitness goals by visiting your website daily!

      And if you're looking for ways to make money online with your fitness blog or gym website, a fitness tracker with a large user base could generate a lot of income.

      Think about it! More search engine traffic means more opportunities to promote your business. 

      You could place more advertising, sell more affiliate products, and build your brand awareness. Eventually, you could even sell your own branded fitness products.

      Here's something obvious: your gym website can be used to help you sell more gym memberships. Better content (like a fitness tracker) can get you more traffic. More traffic leads to more gym memberships!

      There are few things more addictive than fitness user activity logs. They're the next best thing to wearable devices that track your health.

      You could even create your own fitness community. Offer a free version to existing gym members, or sell it as a paid upgrade.

      Fitness trackers in action

      myfitnesspal by Under Armour

      Scaling up your business opportunities might seem like a lofty goal, but fitness tracking can lay the foundations for an entire health-focused website. Take the example of MyFitnessPal by Under Armour or the Fitbit app.

      They built an entire community based around a series of fitness trackers. Users can track calories and determine how many they should be burning to reach their goal weight.

      This website integrates into an Android and iOS fitness app, but it can be simple to work well (as we'll show you below).

      Here's the bottom line: it can be pretty powerful when users can see and track their health data directly. It creates an opportunity for communities to grow & support each other.

      The result? More traffic & more chances to grow your online fitness business.

      By the way, if you are serious about building an online community, there is no better choice than MemberPress. It's the all-in-one membership plugin for WordPress we highly recommend.

      👉 Learn more: Best WordPress Membership Plugins

      memberpress

      What kinds of fitness trackers are there?

      When it comes to fitness tracking, there are a ton of options. You can track everything from weight loss to meal planning. As long as it relates to fitness goals, there's a way to track it!

      Here are a few goal-based fitness trackers you could use on your WordPress site:

      • Fitness calculators
      • Meal trackers
      • BMI calculator
      • Calorie counters
      • Exercise log
      • Workout diary
      • Sleep tracking

      As you can see, there are many ways to collect and display fitness data. It could be as simple as a platform where users can plan workout schedules.

      Another no-brainer idea is meal planning. Creating a meal planner could be as straightforward as configuring a WordPress form builder plugin to display form data in a calendar.

      This setup could also incorporate a macro calorie counter, allowing users to adjust the balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates in their diet. If carbs are the enemy, a WordPress calorie counter makes removing them much easier.

      Wrap things up by collecting body measurements so users can see their progress over time. A graph that clearly displays a user's weight with the progress tracker data can show whether they are gaining or losing weight over time.

      👉 Learn more: How to Make a Fitness Calculator in WordPress

      Who can benefit from creating a fitness tracker?

      If you run a health and fitness business, nothing stops you from putting fitness trackers to work. We've already talked about fitness community sites, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

      • Crossfit clubs
      • Fitness centers
      • Gyms
      • Personal trainers
      • Nutritionists
      • Sports medicine
      • Exercise bloggers
      • Fitness influencers

      The list goes on and on. These days, businesses need great content to grow and attract new customers. Blog articles, guides, and videos are a great start.

      But WordPress goal trackers give your audience a reason to return to your site repeatedly!

      By now, you must be convinced, so let's hop to it!

      Formidable Forms pro plans

      Create a WordPress fitness tracker in 5 steps

      This example shows you how to make a simple yet effective fitness tracker that displays daily progress across a few key fitness metrics.

      1. Download and install Formidable Forms
      2. Create a fitness tracking form
      3. Input a few fitness form entries
      4. Publish your fitness tracking form
      5. Display fitness tracking graphs

       Create Your Fitness Tracker Now!

      1. Download and install Formidable Forms

      You need a WordPress form builder plugin to create a fitness tracker in WordPress. Luckily our Formidable Business plan is all that's required!

      There are some fitness plugins, but a gym WordPress site built with one of those will always be limited. Besides, why buy a WordPress fitness plugin when every website needs a form builder anyway?

      This is worth it if you're serious about upgrading your fitness business. For new users, Formidable Business starts at just $199/year.

      Get Formidable Business

      With a Formidable Business plan, you'll be able to take on fitness tracking and much more:

      • Display form data with eye-catching WordPress graphs
      • Fully integrate with dozens of third-party services (by using our MailChimp WordPress add-on, for example)
      • Make your forms match your WordPress theme with our visual form styler

      In fact, Formidable Business unlocks dozens of powerful WordPress form-building features!

      WordPress Form Building Features

      Here's what you need to get started with a Formidable Business plan:

      • An updated WordPress site
      • Formidable Business license
      • Formidable's lite WordPress plugin (installed automatically with Business)
      • Around 5 minutes of your time

      👉 Stuck? Follow our guide: Install & Activate Formidable Forms

      2. Create a fitness tracking form in WordPress

      Once Formidable is up and running, the next thing to do is create a form. With Formidable's drag-and-drop form builder, this could not be easier!

      All you do is drag in the fields you need, click the update button, and voila!

      WordPress drag and drop form builder

      We will boost body shapes with a simple weight loss tracker for this example. To do this, all we need is a form that tracks weight & the date.

      For this tutorial, let's add the following fields to our form:

      • Date field
      • Number field - OR - Number slider (weight)
      • User ID field

      One thing to point out: we need a User ID field so that the form data will be associated with the logged-in user.

      Be sure to look into the field options to give your number field the appropriate label. In this case, you'd want to specify that users can input weight in kilos or pounds.

      If you want to update the colors, fonts, and styles or any other UI design, head to our Formidable Form Styler.

      Once you've done all that, click Update and move on to step 3.

      Did you know? In Formidable, you can create exercise trackers too. Users can select different activity types like cycling, swimming, or hiking! And, of course, you can graph the results too.

      3. Input some test entries

      This part is straightforward. Click on the Entries tab above the form builder, then click the Add New button. Here, you'll see your newly created form pop up. This will give us test data to display later.

      Now just add a few entries, and move on to step 4.

      4. Publish your fitness tracking form

      Next up, we need to publish our fitness tracking form. If we consider a fitness community site, the perfect place to publish this would be on a user's profile page.

      If you haven't already set up your community website, this might be a challenge. But for testing purposes in this tutorial, we can create a new post or page in the WordPress admin as usual.

      Once you've created a new post or page, we can publish our form using one of the following methods:

      1. Use the shortcode builder
      2. Insert the form shortcode manually
      3. Use a form block
      Publish form Block Add form Editor

      5. Display fitness tracking graphs

      Here's where it all comes together! In theory, there are a lot of places where we might want to display our user's fitness data:

      • Public user profiles
      • Forum signature section
      • Leaderboards section
      • Private profile area

      Once you have the data, it can be displayed in many exciting ways! In this quick example, we'll show you how to display a simple graph on the same page or post you created in the last step.

      We will use a powerful Formidable feature: Charts and graphs to display our data.

      In Formidable, graphs come with a ton of options. So tweaking things to look just how you want them isn't too hard. There are a few things to consider, like which style of graph you want to display.

      Examples of Formidable charts and graphs without a WordPress graph plugin

      To fully tweak your graph, head to the Formidable → Graphs & Charts documentation for more info. And if you're still having trouble, you can always ask our support team - available seven days a week to help!

      In this example, we created the following shortcode to display our weight loss tracking chart:

      [frm-graph fields="102" x_axis="103" type="line" title="Weight tracking" data_type="average"]

      This shortcode takes the entries we input before and graphs them over time. Don't forget to swap out the numbers "102" & "103" to match the field ID's from your own fitness tracking form.

      The resulting graph should look something like this:

      Weight loss tracker graph

      Wrapping up

      After you've tweaked your graph to perfection, you'll have a fitness tracker that community members can proudly show off on their profiles. 

      Hopefully, this guide inspired you to see how much is possible with fitness + Formidable, your best fitness tracker plugin.

      Stay tuned to the Formidable blog for more WordPress tips on forms, fitness, and everything in between. Have a great day!

       Create Your Fitness Tracker Now!


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      Did you know that Formidable Forms is the most advanced WordPress form builder plugin available? With Formidable, you can take your fitness website to a new level. Get started with our free plugin or the full-featured premium version and start feeling the burn today!

      Using WordPress and want to get Formidable Forms for free?

      Get Formidable Forms Lite Now

      This article may contain affiliate links. Once in a while, we earn commissions from those links. But we only recommend products we like, with or without commissions.

      Comments

      1. Tom Alderton says

        December 8, 2020 at 4:32 am

        I think that it would have been very helpful to highlight that in the shortcode - you need to insert "userID="current"

        It drove me mad when testing this

        Reply
        • srwells says

          December 10, 2020 at 10:28 am

          Thanks for letting us know. We'll get this updated.

          Reply
      2. Marcel says

        February 24, 2021 at 8:20 pm

        Would the combination of memberpress and formidable forms allow for the data to be recorded and presented to each user privately?

        So that each member logs in, records their weight, measurements etc and can see their progress displayed in these graphs only in there account, not other members?

        And will admin be able to see and keep track of these as well?

        Thank you.

        Reply
        • srwells says

          February 25, 2021 at 11:44 am

          Yes, Formidable Forms has the ability to display only the user's own submitted information without having access to others' data. Admins also have access to the data.

          Reply
      3. Tom Ness says

        March 3, 2021 at 2:25 pm

        I'm not able to get views to show on my pages... Followed the directions in here and still no go.

        Reply
        • srwells says

          March 3, 2021 at 3:23 pm

          Can you please contact our support team from the support page on our site? We can't provide support in blog comments.

          Reply
      4. Fatma says

        March 25, 2021 at 5:38 am

        can I make it with wpforms instead of the plugins above??

        Reply
        • Diane St Martin says

          March 25, 2021 at 4:53 pm

          Hi there, I am not ultra familiar with WPforms functionality, but I don't think they have the same graphing and statistics functionality. That is where you might run into issues replicating this functionality.

          Reply
      5. Synne says

        April 8, 2021 at 3:51 am

        Hi! This sounds very promising. We have a small community of 200 members, and the admin needs to be able to accumulate and export the data that the members register (data for all workout activity registered in the community) , such as how many km the whole member base have tracked that date/week/month etc into an .csv file or excel. Is that possible?

        Reply
        • srwells says

          April 8, 2021 at 10:06 am

          Hi there, Yes, Formidable Forms has the ability to export your date into a CSV file. You can export both all entries, and filtered data as well.

          Reply
      6. Kay Pitre says

        April 23, 2021 at 12:08 pm

        Is there a way to have two-way communication with fitness trackers such as Samsung Health, Google Fit, Garmin, MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, etc?

        We run a fitness-nutrition-wellness site and looking for something that can help us accomplish this.

        Thanks

        Reply
        • Steve says

          April 23, 2021 at 10:23 pm

          Hi there, Thanks for the question, this functionality isn't currently available in the plugin without customization. Sorry for the limitation.

          Reply
        • Zoe says

          December 7, 2022 at 11:23 am

          I would like to see this integration too. I work for 2 companies that run wellness membership websites and would like to run competitions for members which could include activity goals, etc.. So rather than just asking members to input the number of minutes of activity into a form daily, it would be ideal to pull their data from their Fitbit account, to their wordpress UserID. Is this something you expect your plugin to do at any point in the future?

          Reply
          • srwells says

            December 7, 2022 at 1:39 pm

            Hi Zoe,

            I don't see out-of-the-box integration with Fitbit happening any time soon. But Formidable is super flexible. If Fitbit has an API that allows the retrieval of the information, a good developer should be able to get that data into Formidable Forms.

            Again, this would require custom code and a knowledge of working with APIs, but theoretically, it could be done.

            Reply
      7. Tomer says

        June 16, 2021 at 4:37 am

        HI, does it works with woocommerce membership?

        Reply
        • srwells says

          June 21, 2021 at 8:35 am

          Hi there,

          We do have a Woocommerce integration add-on, so depending on what exactly you are needing, we should be able to help. If you have more specific questions about this, our support team is standing by and ready to help.

          Reply
      8. zabre00 says

        June 25, 2021 at 1:02 pm

        Thank you. I might try this out, see if i can get this working on my site! Thanks for the post.

        Reply
      9. Nick says

        April 20, 2022 at 5:19 pm

        Hi,
        1. How would users go about editing/deleting past records?
        2. Would it be possible to track by category + activities? Example:
        Aerobics - Running
        Aerobics - Walking
        And then display graphs either by Category (Aerobics) or Activity (Running)...

        Thanks

        Reply
        • srwells says

          September 1, 2022 at 9:16 am

          This is all possible, but you'll need to reach out to our support team for specifics on setting these up as it will be more involved than we can address here on the blog.

          Reply
      10. Shelley Ford says

        September 1, 2022 at 8:52 am

        Is it possible to limit the user to one entry per day. I can't find a way to limit this so user can have multiple entries on the same date and get an incorrect comulative total for that day.

        Reply
        • srwells says

          September 1, 2022 at 9:15 am

          You could use the form permissions settings to limit to one entry per cookie and set the cookie expiration to 24 hours. This isn't a perfect fit for your use case though, so you would probably need custom code using a hook: https://formidableforms.com/knowledgebase/frm_validate_field_entry/#kb-limit-responses-for-a-set-time-period

          Reply
      11. Sophie Hansen says

        February 6, 2023 at 11:57 pm

        Great article that you shared about that how to create a fitness tracker. Your blog is valuable. I really appreciate the efforts that you have put into this blog.

        Reply

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