Epic Gymnastics Academy: From WordPress & Brizy to a Custom, Conversion-First Website — Bengaluru Case Study

Engagement: Full website rebuild — custom design, development & lead-capture forms Industry: Sports & fitness — gymnastics coaching Stack: Hand-coded custom site · Netlify · Netlify Forms · mobile-first · Blog + schema Result: A faster, lighter website rebuilt around trial & join forms — and a client-reported rise in leads and conversions

At a glance

Epic Gymnastics Academy (EGA) is one of Bengaluru's best-known gymnastics academies — 22+ years of history, 3,000+ athletes trained, and a mission to win India an Olympic gymnastics gold by 2036. Their website had already been built twice: first on WordPress, then rebuilt on Brizy Cloud. Neither version did the one thing the academy actually needed — turn visitors into booked trial classes.

We rebuilt it a third and final time as a hand-coded custom website on Netlify, designed from the ground up around lead-capture forms.

The client

Epic Gymnastics Academy trains gymnasts of every age and ambition from its facility in Yemalur, Bengaluru — from toddlers taking their first cartwheel to elite athletes chasing a national podium. Across 22+ years, EGA has trained 3,000+ students, backed by 40+ years of coaching excellence and a 4.9★ Google rating.

It's led by founders who compete and coach at the highest level — Master Gangadhar Acharya and Shwetha G Acharya — and it runs two full disciplines under one roof: Artistic Gymnastics and Rhythmic Gymnastics, across structured programs for toddlers, recreational boys and girls, elite athletes, personal coaching and schools.

The brief to Aapta Solutions was direct: the academy is elite, the website should work as hard as the coaches do. Specifically — it needed to stop being a brochure and start generating enquiries.

The starting point: two rebuilds, still not converting

Most case studies start with one old website. EGA's started with two.

The site had first been built on WordPress, then rebuilt again on Brizy Cloud, a hosted page builder. On paper each move was an upgrade. In practice, both shared the same structural problems:

• Page-builder bloat. WordPress-plus-plugins and hosted builders like Brizy generate heavy, generic markup. Pages carried weight the academy never needed, which slows the experience — especially on the mid-range phones most parents browse on.
• Generic, template-shaped design. A builder nudges every site toward the same handful of layouts. For an academy whose whole identity is being elite, "looks like a template" is a real cost.
• Weak lead capture. This was the core failure. The forms were an afterthought — buried, generic, poorly tracked — so traffic that arrived ready to book a trial often left without doing anything. There was no reliable way to know which page or campaign produced an enquiry.
• Awkward to maintain. Each rebuild moved the content into a new proprietary system, and neither made day-to-day updates genuinely easy.

The academy had already paid, twice, for a website that looked fine and converted poorly. The third rebuild had to fix the actual problem: turning visits into enquiries.

Our approach: custom, lightweight, and built around the form

We made a deliberate call not to reach for a third page builder. For a local service business whose website has exactly one job — generate enquiries — the right tool is a lean, custom-built site engineered around the conversion, not a drag-and-drop template loaded with features nobody uses.

Three principles shaped the rebuild:

1. The form is the product. We designed the site backwards from the trial-enquiry form — every page is a path toward Book a free trial class.
2. Lightweight by construction. Hand-coded HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no builder, no plugin stack — served as static files from a global CDN, so pages load fast everywhere.
3. Measurable. Every form carries source attribution, so EGA can finally see which pages and campaigns actually produce leads.

The build

Tech stack

• Hand-coded custom website — plain, modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no page builder and no plugin stack. The entire front end ships as a single versioned stylesheet and a single script, so there's very little for a browser to download or execute.
• Netlify hosting + global CDN — the site is served as static files from the edge, which keeps it fast and resilient with effectively nothing to hack or keep patched (a real contrast to a WordPress install).
• Netlify Forms — the trial-enquiry and join forms are wired to Netlify's form handling, with a built-in honeypot field to catch spam bots and a dedicated /thank-you confirmation step that doubles as a clean conversion signal.
• Mobile-first responsive design — built for a parent on a phone first, scaling up to desktop.
• Schema.org structured data + a Blog — a content engine the builder versions lacked, giving EGA a way to rank for the questions parents search and to feed AI-search engines.

What a visitor can now do

• Explore a program for every age and ambition — Toddler, Recreational (boys and girls), Elite, Personal and School — across both Artistic and Rhythmic gymnastics.
• See the proof — an EGA Stars showcase of the academy's competitive athletes, real parent testimonials, core values, and a look inside the training hall.
• Book a free trial in seconds — a short, focused enquiry form is always one tap away, on every key page.

Built for lead generation — the forms do the work

This is the heart of the rebuild. Where the old WordPress and Brizy versions treated the contact form as a footnote, the custom site is organised around it.

• A short, high-intent trial form. The Book a free trial class enquiry asks only what the academy needs to follow up — name, phone, email, the child's age, and the program of interest — because every extra field costs conversions.
• Join forms on every path. The same focused form is placed wherever a visitor's interest peaks — the hero, the programs, the end of the page — so there's never a dead end between "interested" and "enquired."
• Source attribution baked in. Every submission records where the lead came from, so EGA can finally tell which pages and campaigns produce trials — and spend accordingly.
• Spam kept out. A honeypot field quietly filters out bot submissions, so the academy's inbox fills with real parents, not noise.
• A real conversion step. Each successful enquiry lands on a dedicated thank-you page — a clean, countable signal of a genuine lead rather than a vague "message sent."

The outcome the academy cares about: more of the same traffic now turns into booked trial classes. EGA reports a clear increase in enquiries and conversions since the switch — the direct result of rebuilding the site around the form instead of bolting one on.

Faster and lighter on every device

A gymnastics academy's audience is overwhelmingly parents on phones, often mid-scroll between everything else in their day. The old builder-based site made them wait; the custom build doesn't.

Because the front end is hand-coded and ships as a single lightweight stylesheet and script — rather than the stacked CSS and JavaScript a page builder emits — there's far less for a device to download and run. Served statically from Netlify's CDN, pages arrive quickly on an ordinary mobile connection, and the booking form stays smooth and responsive on a small screen. For a parent deciding whether to book a trial, that speed is the difference between an enquiry and a bounce.

SEO, GEO and AEO: built to be found

A faster site that nobody finds still doesn't fill classes. We built EGA to compete on classic search (SEO), on generative engines like ChatGPT and Gemini (GEO), and on answer engines that quote a single source (AEO) — the same approach set out in our Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) 2026 guide:

• Local-intent structure around how parents actually search — "gymnastics classes in Bangalore", "gymnastics for kids near Yemalur", "rhythmic gymnastics Bengaluru" — reflected in the page titles, headings and content.
• Structured data (schema.org) describing EGA as a real-world sports organisation with a location, programs and reviews, so Google and AI engines can read it as a business, not just a page.
• A blog, so the academy can answer the questions parents ask — what age to start, artistic vs. rhythmic, how trials work — in direct, quotable language that AI answer engines lift and cite.
• A clean, fast, mobile-first build — the technical foundation Google now treats as a baseline for ranking.

You can measure any site's AI-readiness the same way we do, with our free GEO readiness scanner.

Outcome — before and after

The academy moved from a website that had been rebuilt twice and still leaked leads, to one that treats every visit as a chance to book a trial — and measures whether it worked.

The takeaway

Rebuilding a site on a new page builder is a change of scenery, not a change of outcome. For a local service business — a gymnastics academy, a clinic, a studio, a coaching centre — the website's job is to convert interest into an enquiry, and that is a job a lean, custom build around the right forms does far better than a template loaded with features.

EGA had learned that the expensive way, across two rebuilds. The third one fixed the real problem: a fast, custom site, organised around a trial form that's always one tap away, with the tracking to prove what works. That's the pattern we build for across service businesses — and it's the same thinking behind our rebuilds for Arun Sharma Guruji and The Platos School.

If your website gets visits but not enquiries, let's talk about a rebuild, or get a tailored quote.

Frequently asked questions

What platform is the new Epic Gymnastics Academy website built on?

It's a hand-coded custom website — plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no page builder — hosted on Netlify and served from a global CDN. Lead capture runs on Netlify Forms with a spam honeypot and a dedicated thank-you confirmation page. This replaced earlier versions built first on WordPress and then on the Brizy Cloud page builder.

Why move off WordPress and Brizy Cloud?

Both WordPress-with-plugins and hosted page builders like Brizy produce heavy, generic pages and treat lead capture as an add-on. For an academy whose website exists to generate trial bookings, that meant slow pages and weak, untracked forms. A lightweight custom build fixes both — it loads faster and is designed around the enquiry form.

How does the new site generate more leads?

The whole site is built around a short, high-intent trial-enquiry form that appears on every key page, so there's never a dead end between a parent's interest and an enquiry. Each submission records its source for attribution, a honeypot filters out spam, and a dedicated thank-you page marks a genuine conversion. Rebuilding around the form — rather than bolting one on — is what lifts conversions.

Is a custom site harder to update than WordPress?

For the content that changes often — programs, the EGA Stars showcase, blog posts — no. The rebuild keeps editing straightforward while removing the plugin maintenance, security patching and builder lock-in that come with WordPress. And because the site is static, there's effectively no server to be hacked or kept up to date.

Is the new website faster on mobile?

Yes. The front end ships as a single lightweight stylesheet and script instead of the stacked assets a page builder emits, and it's served statically from Netlify's CDN — so pages load quickly on an ordinary phone connection, which is where most parents book a trial.

Does EGA offer both artistic and rhythmic gymnastics?

Yes — Epic Gymnastics Academy runs both Artistic and Rhythmic gymnastics, across programs for toddlers, recreational boys and girls, elite athletes, personal coaching and schools, from its facility in Yemalur, Bengaluru.

Can you build something like this for my business?

Yes — if your site gets traffic but few enquiries, this is exactly the problem a custom, conversion-first rebuild solves. Get a tailored quote or read about an ongoing technology partnership.

Project credits

Built by Aapta Solutions · Founder: Dharmendra Asimi · Bengaluru & Hyderabad, India

Visit the live site: www.epicgymnastics.in

Want a similar build for your business? Talk to us or run a free GEO readiness scan on your current site to see where you stand today.