VM Fight

Overview

VM Fight is a martial arts gym in Bela Vista, São Paulo, teaching Muay Thai, Muay Thai Kids, Boxing and Jiu-Jitsu. Until then it had no website: all of its promotion happened on Instagram and WhatsApp.

I talked to the owner and built the site on my own, to help the gym get found and turn visitors into students. The page brings together the four disciplines, the weekly timetable, the instructors and the contact details with a map, and leads visitors to the trial class, which is free.

Technical decisions

Timetable and instructors live in data files

The timetable and the instructor list live in JSON files. The timetable has one row per time slot and one column per day, and each class takes its colour from its discipline, so swapping Boxing for Jiu-Jitsu on a Tuesday means editing one cell.

What it cost: data and code are not fully separated. A new instructor means editing the JSON and also importing the photo in the component, because Vite cannot resolve an image path written inside JSON. And a discipline the component does not know shows up uncoloured in the timetable.

SEO and GEO without prerendering the page

The site is a React SPA with no server rendering, so anything that does not run JavaScript received an empty page. That includes the crawlers behind AI tools. Instead of prerendering React at build time, I put the gym’s facts straight into the static HTML: JSON-LD structured data with the address, phone and disciplines, plus an llms.txt with the timetable and instructors, a robots.txt and a sitemap. A script checks those files on every build.

What it cost: a crawler that does not run JavaScript reads the gym’s facts but not the page text. Prerendering would deliver everything, but it would mean making the typing animation in the headline, the videos and the Google map work on the server, with a risk of the page breaking as it loads. I left prerendering as the next step, in case Search Console shows missing coverage.

Every booking ends on WhatsApp

Every button to book a trial class opens a chat with the gym with the message already written, including the cards for each discipline. WhatsApp was already the gym’s channel, so the page takes visitors straight there, with no form and no backend.

What it cost: the booking happens outside the site. The page measures visits, but not how many chats turned into a booked class, because that part happens on WhatsApp.

Results and lessons

The site started bringing in students who found the gym by searching on Google, and more people got to know the place through the site before messaging on WhatsApp. The training videos and photos help build trust with people who do not know the gym yet.

The SEO and GEO work came after the site was live, and that is where it became clear that an SPA arrives empty for anything that does not run JavaScript. The gym’s details had to be in the HTML itself for search and AI crawlers to read them.

Performance was the other lesson, because the page has a lot of video. The first version only showed the page after loading all six videos, about 51 MB in total, and the opening took around 10 seconds on average. It now waits only for the top video and takes about 2 seconds.