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.
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, you need exciting content to stand out.
As a health and fitness enthusiast, 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 easily!
Here's what we'll cover:
Once we cover 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?
A fitness tracker can help tremendously if you want to generate a loyal following and drive tons of traffic to your WordPress site.
And if you're looking for ways to make money online with your fitness blog or gym management system, 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.
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
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 around a series of fitness trackers. Users can track calories and determine how many they should burn to reach their goal weight. This website integrates into an Android and iOS fitness app, but it can be simple and 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. From daily calorie intake to body mass index, people can better themselves.
The result? More traffic & more chances to grow your online fitness business.
What kinds of fitness trackers are there?
There are many options for fitness tracking. You can track everything from weight loss to meal planning. As long as it relates to fitness goals, there's a way to do it!
Here are a few goal-based fitness trackers you could use on your WordPress site:
- Fitness calculators
- Meal trackers
- BMI calculator
- Workout log/activity tracker
- Calorie counters
- Exercise log
- Workout diary
- Sleep tracking
As you can see, many ways exist 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 their diet's balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. If carbs are the enemy, a calorie calculator makes removing them much easier.
Wrap things up by collecting body measurements so users can see their progress over time. A graph that 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 using fitness trackers. We've already discussed 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!
You must be convinced by now, so let's hop to it!
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 key fitness metrics.
- Download and install Formidable Forms
- Create a fitness tracking form
- Input a few fitness form entries
- Publish your fitness tracking form
- Display fitness tracking graphs
1. Download and install Formidable Forms
You'd think you need a WordPress fitness tracker plugin.
But you just need the best form plugin for WordPress to create a fitness tracker in WordPress. And our Formidable Business plan is all that's required!
This is worth it if you're serious about upgrading your fitness business. For new users, Formidable Business starts at just $199/year.
With a Formidable Business plan, you'll be able to take on fitness tracking and much more:
- Build any form with our user-friendly form builder
- 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
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 will boost body shapes with a simple weight loss tracker. To do this, we only need a form that tracks weight and 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, styles, or any other UI design, visit our Formidable Form Styler.
Once you've done 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 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 add a few entries, and move on to step 4.
4. Publish your fitness tracking form
Next, we need to publish our fitness tracking form. On a fitness community site, the perfect place to publish this would be on a user's profile page.
This might be a challenge if you haven't already set up your community website. However, 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:
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 users' 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.
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 graph style you want to display.
All you need is the WordPress Charts and Graphs plugin from Formidable Forms, which is under the Add-ons.
Then, you can simply add the Formidable Chart block to insert a chart on your post or page:
The resulting graph should look something like this:
Get a fitness form builder now
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. Have a great day!
Tom Alderton says
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
srwells says
Thanks for letting us know. We'll get this updated.
Marcel says
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.
srwells says
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.
Tom Ness says
I'm not able to get views to show on my pages... Followed the directions in here and still no go.
srwells says
Can you please contact our support team from the support page on our site? We can't provide support in blog comments.
Fatma says
can I make it with wpforms instead of the plugins above??
Diane St Martin says
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.
Synne says
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?
srwells says
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.
Kay Pitre says
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
Steve says
Hi there, Thanks for the question, this functionality isn't currently available in the plugin without customization. Sorry for the limitation.
Zoe says
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?
srwells says
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.
Tomer says
HI, does it works with woocommerce membership?
srwells says
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.
zabre00 says
Thank you. I might try this out, see if i can get this working on my site! Thanks for the post.
Nick says
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
srwells says
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.
Shelley Ford says
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.
srwells says
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
Sophie Hansen says
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