FitActive changed its website. New does not mean well designed

Before the new website, I had looked at the old one

This is not a diplomatic opening intended to soften what follows. It is exactly why the website interests me: a strong brand should have a digital project that matches its strength.

Professional habit makes me examine almost every website belonging to a business I encounter. I do not have to go hunting for mistakes. After so many years, I naturally notice hierarchy, follow the navigation and ask what someone arriving for the first time will actually find.

The previous FitActive ↗ website felt dated, scattered and no longer equal to the scale the brand had reached. It contained plenty of information but did not provide an equally clear entrance. Finding a club, understanding the benefits, checking membership or separating the customer journey from the franchise journey took more effort than it should have.

After an interaction with the founder on social media, I took the opportunity to introduce myself as a developer and mention the possibility of rethinking the website. The conversation went no further. I am not publishing the message or any other details because it was a private exchange and they would add nothing to the technical assessment.

FitActive then published its new website

FitActive later launched a completely renewed website. The project had clearly already been under way. My message has no causal connection with what was published, and I have no basis for suggesting otherwise.

My first impression was positive. The new website is unquestionably more modern than the old one. The opening has greater presence, the visual language is contemporary and the brand appears closer to the scale it has achieved.

Then I looked beneath the surface.

My professional assessment is clear: the new website is visually better than its predecessor but, as it appeared publicly on 11 September 2026, its technical quality did not match the brand.

The visual improvement is real. That alone does not automatically turn a restyling into a complete digital project.

A necessary statement before the findings

FitActive is not my client. I do not know who built the new website, the budget, constraints, timetable or assigned objectives. I cannot judge the people or the production process. I can examine the public result, just as I would examine any other website.

I checked the HTML source, the DOM produced by the browser, the resources present after loading, the server headers and the HTTP and HTTPS responses. I also ran Lighthouse 13.4.1 in Chrome 152, once with the mobile profile and once with the desktop profile.

The Lighthouse results are a dated laboratory snapshot, not field data collected from real users over time. That distinction matters: professional assessment means stating not only what was found, but also how far the conclusion can reasonably go.

Five findings beneath the surface

The homepage contained no h1 element despite visually presenting a primary message. It contained two main elements instead, one nested inside the other. The main heading and main content region are not decorative details: they describe the page hierarchy to browsers, search engines and assistive technology.

The code contained no meta description, canonical link or JSON-LD structured data. None of these omissions alone proves that the website cannot be found or work. Together, they describe incomplete foundations on a newly redesigned homepage.

The third finding was written in comments left in the source: “CSS vecchio sito necessario alle pagine già esistenti” — old website CSS required for existing pages — followed a few lines later by “CSS nuovo template AINest”. The homepage loaded resources from the old website alongside the new template. It even included a stylesheet named fit-active-staging.css and six scripts in the JsOld directory.

The same block of 16 AINest JavaScript files appeared twice in the DOM. The bootstrap.min.css, style.css and responsive.css stylesheets also appeared twice. This does not necessarily mean 32 separate downloads, because the browser may reuse the same resources. It does mean the integration had not been cleaned up.

Finally, the Open Graph image was declared with an http:// address while the public website used HTTPS. That is not evidence of a security breach. It is an inconsistency in metadata intended for sharing.

These are not five different ways of saying that I dislike the page. They are elements of the public result that anyone with the relevant skills can verify.

What I checked about security

It would be wrong to claim the website was insecure without an authorised assessment. It would be equally unhelpful to stop at that caveat and ignore what the server makes publicly observable.

The homepage used a verifiable HTTPS certificate, HTTP traffic redirected to HTTPS, and the affinity cookies returned over the secure connection carried Secure and HttpOnly attributes. An HSTS header was also present. Those are positive elements and should be acknowledged.

The protection declared in the response headers was nevertheless partial. I found no Content Security Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy or explicit protection against the page being embedded in a frame. The published HSTS policy lasted 30 days and did not declare includeSubDomains or preload.

The template is not the problem

The source explicitly identified the new template as AINest and loaded its resources from /Template/ainest/. A public TemplateMonster listing ↗ presents Ai-Nest as an HTML5 template designed for AI, chatbots, SaaS, startups and technology companies.

At the time of the review, the visual base was listed for a few dozen dollars. That does not represent what FitActive paid and provides no basis for estimating it. I do not know the licence, supplier, hours, customisation or services included in the project.

Using a commercial template is not automatically wrong. It can be a proportionate foundation when it is chosen carefully, adapted to the context and cleared of components, dependencies and structures that are not needed.

The professional problem is not starting from AINest. It is reaching production with overlaps, duplication, residues and incomplete semantic foundations. A template can accelerate visual composition; it cannot direct the whole project by itself.

A restyling changes the appearance. A project governs the whole

I cannot conclude that the website contained an exploitable flaw, failed to sell or was built by an incompetent supplier. I do not know its conversion data or contract, and I do not attribute what I see in the code to the people involved. I can document that, under the test conditions, the homepage was extremely heavy and slow, particularly in the mobile profile.

Rebuilding a website means deciding what to retain, what to remove and how content, URLs, functions and journeys will coexist through the transition. HTML structure, dependencies, accessibility, performance, SEO, metadata, security and maintenance should not arrive at the end like a coat of technical paint.

In my method, they are part of the initial decisions and are checked before and after publication. That does not make every project of mine infallible. It makes every decision traceable and every anomaly correctable, without pretending that invisible work does not exist.

The new FitActive website shows the distance between the two approaches. Its appearance changed and the visual improvement is real. Beneath that surface, however, the code described a transition that had not been fully governed.

The opportunity that could have become a Pagina Zero

Had that first conversation continued, this could have been one of the cases in which I proposed a Pagina Zero: after interest and consent, a private homepage that makes priorities concrete before discussing the full commission.

The conversation did not continue, and I neither built nor presented a Pagina Zero for FitActive. I make that clear because the method is not about producing unsolicited proposals for every company that interests me. It begins only when there is a genuine possibility of working together.

The analysis of the website that was actually published still shows something important: how I distinguish appearance from implementation, and a restyling from a complete digital project.

Even a major brand can receive a digital result below its reputation. This does not prove that it failed to hire professionals; it shows that a supplier’s name or a budget cannot replace method, direction and verification.

The website can be new. The work still has to be complete.