Revity Pilates is a pilates studio in Ontario, Canada. When they got in touch, their site was on Wix, the way most studios start out. Eight months later the site runs on WordPress, and classes are booked through a system we built from scratch, simply because what the studio needed did not exist as an off-the-shelf product.
Wix outgrew the way the studio works
Wix is not bad. For a quick start without a developer it is perfectly fine, and that is exactly its job. The trouble started where the business itself starts, at booking. Group classes have a limited number of seats. Memberships are not paid as a monthly subscription but as a package spent per visit. Every instructor has their own schedule and their own clients. None of that is a question of how a page looks, it is logic the Wix editor simply will not let you touch. When the platform will not let you change how you work, you either change how you work or you change the platform.
Why an off-the-shelf plugin is not the answer
There are solid booking plugins for WordPress, and each of them does one thing well. The studio needed five things working together as one system, not five separate pieces negotiating with each other. A group class that disappears from the offer the moment it fills up. A package drawn down per visit. Payment tied both to the package and to the exact slot. An instructor who sees only their own. Chat support in the same flow, without waiting on email. Stitch that together from three or four plugins trying to talk to each other and you get something fragile: the next update to any one of them and something breaks. So we built a custom solution that works as one piece from day one, because it is one piece.
How we did it
We redesigned the site to look like the studio, not like an off-the-shelf theme. We moved the content over from Wix page by page and put 301 redirects on the old URLs, so the ranking they already had on Google was not lost. We tuned speed and hosting, because a site that introduces a new client to a trial class has to open fast on a phone, that decision is made in a few seconds. And we did not bolt the booking system on afterwards, we built it alongside the site, as part of it.
The result
Today the whole flow goes through one place: the client picks a slot and a package, pays, and the schedule shows up for the instructor teaching that class. There is no chain of plugins breaking on every update and no manual confirmation of each payment. The studio does its job, and the system does its.
If your studio, gym or wellness centre is outgrowing an off-the-shelf platform, see how we approach web design, or request a quote.