How to Create a Fitness Tracker in WordPress

Are you a fitness buff running a community site? In this step-by-step guide, we'll show you how to make a fitness tracker for your WordPress website.

Approximate read-time: 7.5 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 interesting content to stand out from the crowd.

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

But in this article, we'll show you how to create a fitness tracker for your WordPress site the easy way!

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?
• How to create a WordPress fitness tracker

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

Why create a WordPress fitness tracker?

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. If your users can track their fitness goals by visiting your website daily, everybody wins!

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 it for free to existing gym members, or sell it as a paid upgrade.

Fitness trackers in action

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.

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

This website integrates into an Android and iOS app, but it doesn't need to be very complicated to work well (as we'll show you below).

Here's the bottom line: when users can see and track their health data directly, it can be quite powerful. 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 that we highly recommend.

👉 Learn more: Best WordPress Membership Plugins

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 a lot of 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 them if they gaining or losing weight over a period of 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 is stopping 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 come back to your site again and again!

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

Create a WordPress fitness tracker in 5 steps

In this example, we are going to show 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

1. Download and install Formidable Forms

To create a fitness tracker in WordPress, you need the WordPress form builder plugin. Luckily our Formidable Business plan is all that's required!

There are some fitness plugins out there, 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?

If you're serious about upgrading your fitness business, this is worth it. 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!

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!

For this example, we are going to boost body shapes with a simple weight loss tracker. 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.

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

3. Input some test entries

This part is really easy. Just 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 let's move on to step 4.

4. Publish your fitness tracking form

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

Truth be told, if you haven't already set up your community website, this might be a challenge. But for testing purposes in this tutorial, we can just 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

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, there are a lot of interesting ways it can be displayed! In this quick example, we'll show you how to display a simple graph on the same page or post that you created in the last step.

To display our data, we are going to make use of a powerful Formidable feature: Charts and graphs.

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.

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 7 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:

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 just how much is possible with fitness + Formidable.

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

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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 whole new level. Get started with our free plugin or the full-featured premium version and start feeling the burn today!