What a gym website has to answer before a first visit

For your trade 5 min read

Nobody hesitates over a gym because of the price. Here is what a gym website has to answer about the first ten minutes, the schedule and getting out.

Somebody has driven past your gym twice a day for six months. It is ten at night, they have decided that this week is the week, and they are on your website with their thumb hovering. The thing stopping them is not the price and it is not the equipment list.

It is that they do not know what happens when they walk through the door, and they are not going to call you to ask.

Describe the first ten minutes, step by step

Where to park. Which door. Whether they need to book first or can simply turn up. Who they will speak to when they come in. Whether there is paperwork. Whether somebody shows them round, and how long that takes. What to wear. Whether they need a padlock, a towel, their own mat.

Write it as a short numbered sequence in plain words. It is unglamorous and it is the most reassuring thing on the site, because the fear it answers is about walking into a room where everybody else knows the rules, not about fitness.

Put the schedule on the page, and date it

A class schedule as a PDF is a schedule nobody reads. On a phone it opens as a document that has to be pinched and dragged, and it is usually the version from whenever somebody last had time to export one.

Put the classes on the page itself, as text, so they can be read at arm's length on a phone in a parking lot. Then put a line above them saying when the schedule was last changed. A dated schedule that is three weeks old is trustworthy. An undated one that might be from last spring costs you the person who turns up for a class that no longer runs.

Say what a membership actually commits somebody to

The hesitation at ten at night is rarely about the monthly figure, and more often about how long they would be tied in.

Say whether it is rolling month to month or a fixed term. Say whether there is a joining fee. Say how much notice ending it needs, and how somebody gives that notice: online, in person, in writing. Say what happens if they are injured or away for two months.

Every one of those is a question people have been trained to expect a gym to answer evasively. Answering them straight, in the same plain type as everything else, is unusual enough to be worth doing on its own.

Make leaving easy to find

Put the cancellation process on the site where anybody can find it, before they join. People check. A gym that hides the exit is telling you something about how it plans to treat you, and a gym that publishes it plainly is telling you something too. If your terms are ordinary and fair, saying so out loud costs you nothing and is the strongest single thing on the page.

Show the actual room

Photographs of models with perfect form on equipment you do not own are worse than no photographs, because the reader knows what they are looking at and adjusts their trust accordingly.

Photograph your own floor. The free weight area, the changing rooms, the entrance from the parking lot so somebody can recognize it when they arrive. Include a shot at a normal hour with normal people in it. A person deciding whether they would feel out of place is trying to see who else is in the room, and stock photography is the one thing that cannot tell them.

Say when it is busy and when it is quiet

The person most nervous about starting wants the emptiest hour of the week, and there is no way for them to find it out except by turning up and hoping.

Write it down. Which mornings are heaving. Which afternoons have four people in. Whether Sunday evening is dead. If the doors open at five and nobody is in until six thirty, say so. This is free to write, impossible to find anywhere else, and answers the person hovering over the join button.

Say who will be there

Names and faces of whoever is actually on the floor, with a line each on what they do rather than qualifications stacked into a paragraph of initials.

If the gym is unstaffed for parts of the day, say which parts and say what happens if something goes wrong during them. Somebody training alone at six in the morning would like to know that before the first time, not during it.

A short checklist

• The first ten minutes, written as a short sequence of steps
• Classes listed as text on the page, not in a PDF
• The date the schedule was last changed, shown above it
• Membership length, joining fee and notice period, said plainly
• The cancellation process, findable before anybody joins
• Photographs of your own room, including at a busy hour
• The quiet hours, named by day
• Who is on the floor, with names, and when the place is unstaffed

Questions people ask

What should be on a gym website homepage

Where you are, what it costs to join, when classes run, and what happens on a first visit. A person should be able to decide from those four things alone.

Should the class schedule be a PDF

No. A PDF is hard to read on a phone and tends to go stale without anybody noticing. Text on the page can be corrected in a minute.

Do I need photographs of members

You need photographs of the room. If members are in them, ask first and keep it to people who are happy to be there.

Should I publish how to cancel a membership

Yes. People look for it before joining, and finding it easily is reassuring rather than off-putting.

How do I make a gym feel less intimidating online

Describe the first visit in order, show the real room, and say which hours are quiet. Nervousness is about not knowing the routine, and the routine is something you can simply write down.

What if my schedule changes every month

Then it needs to be somewhere you can edit in a few minutes without calling anybody. A schedule that is annoying to change is a schedule that ends up wrong.