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 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 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 traffic means more opportunity. 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!
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
Those might seem like lofty goals, 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 have the ability to 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 planners
- BMI trackers
- Calorie counters
- Exercise trackers
- 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 calorie counter, allowing users to adjust the balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates in their diet. If carbs are the enemy, a 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 can show them if they are going up or down.
👉 Learn more: How to Make a Fitness Calculator in WordPress
Who can benefit from creating a fitness tracker?
If you run a fitness business, there should be nothing 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 really 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 fitness 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.
- Download and install Formidable Forms
- Create a fitness tracking form
- Input some test entries
- Publish your fitness tracking form
- Display fitness tracking graphs
1. Download and install Formidable Forms
To create a fitness tracker in WordPress, you need a 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.
With a Formidable Premium 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 WordPress forms match your website with our visual form styler
In fact, there are dozens of powerful WordPress form building features that are unlocked in Formidable Business!
Here's what you need to get started with a Formidable Business plan:
- An updated WordPress site
- Formidable Premium license (purchased at our pricing page)
- Formidable's lite WordPress plugin (installed automatically with a Premium)
- Around 5 minutes of your time
👉 Stuck? Follow our guide: install & activate Formidable Forms
2. Create a fitness tracking form
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 a form that tracks weight & the date.
For the purposes of 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 kilometers or miles.
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.
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:
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: 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!
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!
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