The Challenge

Creating a new digital experience in spite of stability and usability issues.

Gold’s Gym has been an iconic name in fitness since 1965 when Joe Gold opened the first location in Venice Beach, California. Frequented by Arnold Schwarzenegger and featured in the 1977 movie Pumping Iron, the original Gold’s Gym is dubbed the “Mecca of bodybuilding.” Today, Gold’s Gym is the world’s largest provider of coed fitness centers with more than 3 million members and 700 locations in the United States and across the globe. Gold’s Gym continues to be a leader in the fitness industry by equipping gyms with cutting-edge group fitness programs, the latest in cardio and strength training equipment and passionate staff committed to helping members achieve their goals.

In recent years, Gold’s Gym has focused on integrating their digital and online tools to enhance the member experience. Their state of the art mobile app, for example, is a differentiator and was a huge success with members. Their recent endeavor to redesign the Gold’s Gym website, on the other hand, was a different story. After spending eight months redesigning goldsgym.com, they ran into significant stability and usability issues at launch causing member satisfaction ratings to decline and significantly impacting their ability to attract new leads. During that difficult time, the team at Gold’s Gym reached out to Credera.

“I’ll never forget the day when the [Credera] team—who had nothing to do with the failed project but was willing to support us and right the ship—said, ‘We won’t let you fail. We’ve got your back,” says Michael Cobb, chief marketing officer of Gold’s Gym.

The Solution

Optimizing and enhancing site performance to drive customer acquisition and increase revenue.

Immediately, Credera worked to identify and correct the highest priority usability and performance issues by installing a performance monitoring tool that identified bottlenecks in the production application. At the same time, the project team interviewed the previous agency to better understand the project history. Credera analyzed the WordPress, PHP, Apache, and MySQL configurations as well as performance and bounce rate data via Google Analytics. Credera then made informed recommendations to the production environments. Credera optimized the current site’s performance in a systematic, timely fashion while reducing technical debt.

After the site was stable, Credera developed additional site enhancements including a much-improved gym locator and a new scheduler to allow gyms to publish their group fitness schedule and other gym events—both critical components for driving customer acquisition and increasing revenue.  Credera’s Experience Design Practice played a key role in optimizing the usability and aesthetics of the site.

The Results

Helping more customers reach their potential through fitness.

Gold’s Gym now offers a much more functional and user-friendly digital experience.

Significant improvements across the site have resulted in:

• 12% improvement in page load times.

• 18% increase in average session duration.

• 6% decrease in bounced rates.

• 65% increase in conversion rates.

Gold’s Gym is committed to helping people reach their potential through fitness and is leading the way in the use of digital to improve the fitness experience of its members.