TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
It is Sunday night in Shawnee, and someone who has been meaning to start lifting for two years is on their phone looking at your gym. They are not comparing equipment. They are trying to work out whether they will feel stupid walking in on Tuesday at six. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites across the Kansas City metro, and I have built for a strongman gym and a morning kettlebell studio. Both taught me the same thing: a gym website has one job, and it is not selling memberships.
Its job is to get a slightly nervous person to show up once. Everything after that is your coaches, your floor, and your community. The site cannot do any of that, but it can absolutely stop it from ever happening.
What a first-timer is actually checking
Whether they would say it out loud or not, every new visitor is looking for the answer to five things:
- Is this for people like me? Beginners, women, people over fifty, people who have never touched a barbell.
- What happens when I walk in? Who meets me, what do I do, how long does it take.
- When are the classes, and can I actually make one with my schedule?
- What does it cost, roughly? Not the fine print. A number.
- Where exactly are you, and where do I park?
A site that answers those in under a minute gets a first visit. A site that opens with a slow-motion video of someone deadlifting five hundred pounds, with the schedule buried three taps deep and the price hidden behind a contact form, gets a closed tab. The strong person in the video is not your prospect. Your prospect is the person watching it and deciding they do not belong there.
The schedule is the most important page you have
More people look at the schedule than any other page on a gym site, and it is usually the worst one. It is a screenshot of a spreadsheet, or an embedded widget from the booking software that takes four seconds to load and does not fit on a phone screen. On both of the gym sites I have built, the schedule got more attention than the homepage, and it earned it.
A good schedule page loads instantly, fits a phone, shows this week, and makes it obvious which classes are open to beginners. If you run a morning studio, the 5:30 and 6:15 classes are the whole business, and they should be the first thing on the screen. Each class name should link to a sentence about what it actually is, because Foundations means nothing to someone who has never been inside.
Show the first visit, step by step
The single most effective page on a gym site is one most gyms do not have: a plain description of your first visit. Arrive ten minutes early. Sara meets you at the door. You fill out a short form, she shows you around, and you join the class with the coach keeping an eye on you. You will be sore tomorrow. That is normal.
Write it exactly like that. It removes the fear of the unknown, which is the real reason people do not walk in. Put a photo of the actual front door and the actual coach on that page. The stock photo of a smiling model on a treadmill does the opposite of what you want, because your prospect knows they do not look like that.
Pricing, and why hiding it costs you
Gyms hide pricing because a chain sales playbook said to get people in the door first. That works for a big-box gym with a sales desk. For a small studio in Overland Park or Lenexa, it reads as expensive, and it sends the most careful prospects, the ones who become the best long-term members, to the studio that put a number on the page.
You do not need the full price sheet. A starting number and what it includes is enough. Unlimited classes from $149 a month, a drop-in for $20, first class free. That is all a person needs to decide whether to keep reading. It also filters out the people who were never going to join, which saves your coaches a lot of intro-call time.
Photos of your gym, not a gym
Every gym site I inherit has the same photos: the empty rack of dumbbells, the model on the rower, the motivational quote over a black and white barbell. They tell a prospect nothing, because the prospect is trying to picture themselves in your space with your people.
What works is your actual members, mid-class, including the ones who are clearly new. Your coaches, named, with a sentence in their own words. Your front door, your parking, your lobby. A strongman gym has a 410 pound stone going to a shoulder, and that is worth more than any stock library. A kettlebell studio has the 6:15 crew laughing after a hard set. Take a phone into every class for a month and you will have everything the site needs. It is the same advice I give contractors and it works for the same reason: people believe what they can see.
The booking software problem
Most studios run on a membership platform for billing and class booking, and most of those platforms offer a website too. Do not use it. The site they generate is slow, looks like every other studio on the platform, and you cannot take it with you when you switch. Keep the platform for what it is good at, billing and check-in, and build the site separately so you own it. That distinction is the whole point of who owns your website.
The booking button on your site should go straight to the class, not to the platform's homepage. If the platform's booking pages are ugly on a phone, and they usually are, a custom booking page on your own site that talks to the platform behind the scenes is a small build and worth every dollar. It is one of the more common pieces of custom development I do for gyms.
Showing up when someone searches
Gym searches in this metro are local and specific. Kettlebell classes Overland Park, strongman gym Kansas City, morning workout classes near me. Your Google Business Profile carries most of that, and it needs the right category, real hours, and photos from inside the gym, because the map result is what people see first. The site backs it up with a page for each type of training you offer, written in the words a beginner would search, not the words a coach would use. Local SEO for Kansas City covers the profile side in detail.
What loses the first visit
These are the mistakes that send a prospect to the next tab without ever leaving a complaint:
- A full-screen video that takes five seconds to load on a phone and shows only elite athletes.
- A schedule that is a screenshot, an embedded widget, or a PDF.
- No pricing at all, or pricing behind a form.
- No description of what happens on a first visit.
- Stock photos instead of your members and your coaches.
- No address on the homepage, no parking note, no photo of the entrance.
- A join button that dumps people onto the booking platform's login page.
What to fix this month
If you do nothing else, do these, in this order:
- Write a Your First Visit page in plain language, with a photo of the door and a photo of the coach who meets people.
- Rebuild the schedule page so it loads fast and fits a phone, with beginner-friendly classes marked.
- Put a starting price and a first-class offer on the homepage.
- Replace every stock photo with a real one from your floor. Twenty photos from one week of classes is plenty.
- Fill out your Google Business Profile completely and add the same photos.
- Point every book or join button at the specific class, not the platform homepage.
None of that is a redesign. It is a week of paying attention and a phone full of photos, and it will do more for first visits than a new logo ever has.
What I build for gyms
I build sites for gyms and studios across the metro, from a fast five-page site with a proper schedule and first-visit page to a full build with custom booking that talks to your membership platform. Prices are on the pricing page, so you can see roughly where you land before we talk. If you just want a straight answer about the site you already have, send me the address and I will tell you what a first-timer sees.