A website for your personal training business is your virtual storefront to the world. Having a website that gets your message across to potential clients is crucial for your success as a personal trainer.
A step by step guide to your own personal trainer website builder
It needs to grab your audience's attention and get them to take action, which in your case will be picking up the phone or getting incontact with you. It's vital that they immediately know that they have come to the right place and that you are the right personal trainer to help them.
First impressions last!
It’s a view into who and what you are all about and how you can help them. Your personal trainer website home page should show how driven you are to getting your clients to where they want to be and you know EXACTLY how to help them.
Personal Trainer Website Builder Tips
So let’s break this down into some easy to follow steps so you can set up your personal trainer website with minimal stress.
1. Attracting Your Ideal Client
For a new trainer, it’s easy to say you’ll take on any client. But if you can pinpoint what type of client you want this will ultimately set you apart from the rest. Why? Because your site will show who you are trying to attract and why.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Which clients do you want to attract?
- What problem do you solve?
- Who are you best suited to work with?
- Who is your ideal client?
You don’t want to attract the average housewife if your perfect client is a serious bodybuilder that needs to be competition ready in the next three months.
You should spend some time researching your perfect client. Write down all the pros and cons of each client that you want to attract. By doing this you will have a better idea of who will be joining your program and you can reflect this message on your website.
Click here to download our Avatar checklist >>
2. Designing Your Personal Trainer Website
Designing your website can be daunting and in some cases it causes you to procrastinate. That is not the goal here!
Once you have profiled your ideal client, you can have a look at other personal training websites to see how they present themselves online.
The message, visual images and speech are three of the most important things to attract a new client hooked without ever having to utter the words “sign up now”.
You could even include a short video!
It’s the 21st century so people’s attention spans are getting shorter. They would much rather watch a 3 minute video than read a lengthy blog on what you can do for them. A short video compilation showing and talking about your previous happy clients achieving amazing results tells your visitors why you are their best choice to work with.
Don’t let this stop you getting a website that generate you loads of clients for your personal training business. If you suck at designing, that's ok, after all you're not a designer, youre a personal trainer.
Why not check out some of our clients sites for some inspiration >> Personal Trainer Website Examples
3. Where and When to Invest
When searching for a web designer for a personal trainer website builder, you should let their results speak for itself. You want to work with someone that understand the fitness industry and has experience, not just in designing websites, but in designing websites that attract new clients. Ask for examples of their work and let them show you that they can help you..
Whether you’re starting up or are already an established personal trainer, either way you shouldn't spend thousands just to have a website that sucks and does not attract new clients.
Other areas to look into include:
- Quality Images: you don’t want to use low quality smartphone photos on your site. That will be off putting to anyone that visits. Browse different photographers in your area and find someone whose work you admire. Try and find someone that specialises in your niche.
- Logo: use the services of a professional designer either locally or online. Be sure to request your logo as a PNG file as well as a vector file. (PNG files have a transparent background so you can use it on marketing materials and your website. Vector files can be resized without affecting the image quality).
4. Purchase a Domain and Web Hosting
You will need a domain for your website and in order to have a professional email address. Decent hosting will also make sure that your website never or rarely goes offline. Don’t be that trainer that uses a gmail or a yahoo address.
There are a ton of good places available to get your domain and hosting and these won’t cost too much.
Remember not to use vague domain extensions. Try to stick to .com, .co.uk or .co. Strange extensions will make things confusing for people who want to work with you.
Use should also use easy to spell wording for your domain and avoid hyphens or unnecessary punctuation. For example: www.JohnDoePT.com. Notice how sleek and straightforward this is!
We recommend either Godaddy.com or 123reg.co.uk. Take your pick and search for the .com version of your exact business name.
Tips for selecting a domain:
- Who are you and what do you believe in as a trainer?
- What do you do and what do you achieve?
- Does it have longevity?
- Don’t make up words like biz or fitnezz
- Ask your friends and family for opinions BUT ultimately listen to your avatar
5. Install a Content Management System
A content management system allows you to easily make changes and update the content on your website.
There are various CMS available, but for the one that we recommend is WordPress. This it is favoured by many new and established businesses and allows you or your designer to customise your site.
Okay, your head is probably spinning with all the IT lingo right now. But think of it like this:
Look at it as though it is a car. Your domain is your engine, your web hosting is your fuel and your CMS is the body.
6. Pick your Perfect Theme
Rather than using a free theme buy one you love. Using themes allows you to build professional looking websites without needing to use coding and the best thing is, it’s easy for you to use and update!
That way you’ll have more control over it as well as extensive support from the designers of the theme.
You want to choose a theme which is as unique as you are and captures your audience instantly.
We recommend Thrive and Divi have a look at their sites and see which ones appeal to you more.
Ideally the themes are to make your life easier and allow you create a beautiful looking website but we able to change things up or update if should you need to.
7. Find a Similar Site
Find a website that is similar to what you are looking for. Use it for inspiration but do not copy it.
- The parts of this site appeal to you and would appeal to your ideal client.
- What aspects of it would you want to have on your site
- Sections are you going to include on your site?
- Home Page
- About
- Testimonials / Success Stories
- Blog
- Services
- Get in touch
You could even use several sites as reference for what you are looking for. You will more than likely be able to very quickly see what you don’t like.
The more clear you are with what you want the quicker you will be able to get your website up and running.
8. Useful WordPress Plugins For Personal Trainer Websites
With WordPress there are a number of plugins that are must-haves. There are both free and paid-for ones available depending on what you want.
They need to be installed in order to increase your web presence and to be proactive when it comes to marketing and keeping in touch
Here are some WordPress Plugins we recommend:
- Yoast SEO to optimise your website for search engines
- W3 Total Cache to help your site work faster
- Akismet filters out potential spam comments on your blog
- Google Analytics allows you to see where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing on your website
- Backup Buddy allows you to set a schedule to automatically backup your website and store it safely
- WPForms is a drag and drop form builder allows you to easily create contact forms
- OptinMonster helps you to convert all abandoning website visitors into email subscribers
9. Email Marketing
Aka ‘Relationship Marketing’ where you can move your prospects along the buying journey. You see someone might not be ready to buy from you straight away.
Regularly emailing your list is a great way to keep in touch with your clients and potential clients as you can share valuable information, tips and tricks and other information via newsletters.
Start with something simple, solve a problem that your ideal client has and give it to them in a way that is convenient. You can offer free trials, a webinar or an eBook in return for their email address.
I would suggest Aweber if you are not very technically minded. If you can opt for ActiveCampaign as the automation tools are very useful.
10. Share Your Client Success Stories
A great way to do showcase what you do is to collect client testimonials.
Your client feedback is important because it shows that you will be able to get your client to where they want to be.
Tell the story of your clients, it’s not about you it’s about the client and what you helped them achieve. It’ not just about before and after pictures, although they are important. You want your potential clients to relate to them.
Some tips for testimonials:
- Always get permission, make it part of your onboarding process
- Use their name where possible
- Keep them up to date, people won’t trust testimonies from 4 years ago!
- Share the time period that it took to achieve these results
Quick tip: Add three of your favourite client testimonials to your homepage as a personal touch. If you are a newbie, ask some people that need your help to work with you in exchange for a testimonial.
11. Know Your Endgame
The idea that when someone visits your website they know exactly what to expect. What is it you want your visitor to do.
Your CTA (call to action) needs to be clear and simple. It also needs to be less than 3 clicks. You don’t want to make your visitor work too hard do you?
When someone visits your site what do you want your website to achieve?
- Contact you?
- Book in a consultation call?
- Download your ‘cheatsheet’ so you get their email address?
- Join your Facebook group or something else?
Think about the end results and then you can reverse engineer the process and become your own personal trainer website builder.
12. Get Beta-Testers
You don’t want to publish your site and find that there are a ton of things that don’t work. So get some beta-testers to try out and critique your site. It’s rare that friends and family will critique your site honestly so try not to use them as testers.
There are many sites available that offer testing at affordable rates, such as Usertesting and Fiverr. If you’re a member of any Facebook groups for business owners you could ask some people there to help you out.
You need to ensure that:
- Email capture link or forms are working
- Your website looks sleek and professional
- Social media sharing options all work
- It is easy to contact you. Nobody likes to go through a bazillion pages just to find an email address or telephone number
- Your location is specified clearly. Can they click on your pinned address and find you easily on Google Maps?
- Your photos are clear, professional and friendly.
Always ask those who critique your site if they would change anything. This doesn’t mean that you have to make every single change they suggest, but you should at the very least consider what they say.
Once you’ve have your website tested, you can share it with your existing clients, friends and family.
Now that your site is beautiful and up and running, go out there and make some serious money by helping people change their lives.
Alternatively if you don't want to do all the work yourself and would rather spend your time working with clients rather than being a personal trainer website builder, you can get an Accelerate Personal Trainer Website up and running for you.
You can check out some Personal Trainer Website Examples here