How AjaxShowtime built up an active community with FootballCMS.com and grew traffic 24%

World's biggest AFC Ajax news website

Ajaxshowtime is the biggest news website in the world covering news about AFC Ajax from Amsterdam. It started out by using a custom CMS, but during the years, owner Sjoerd Valkering found that AjaxShowtime's growth was limited by its CMS.

The challenges AjaxShowtime faced

It became increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest SEO developments and changes to the Google Algorithm. Developing new features requested by the community, like a match center and live scores, was too expensive. So as a single publisher, Valkering Media found themselves stuck between making a huge investment or losing the battle for traffic and users to bigger publishers.

Another challenge being faced by AjaxShowtime was that their website would become slow during big traffic peaks (especially during the busy transfer period in August). Their mobile app even went offline a few times during these traffic spikes.

As AjaxShowtime had a lot of registered users posting a lot of comments, handling all these comments also became increasingly difficult. They were trying to prevent unwanted comments and trolls from invading the discussion. But this was not easy with their custom CMS's outdated moderation system. 

Another problem AjaxShowtime faced was that it took its editors quite some time to publish articles and share them across all of their social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This was a major issue because with breaking news, timing is everything, and the website that publishes first wins the most traffic.

Also, embedding YouTube videos and Instagram or Twitter posts into articles slowed the editor's workflow even more.  

Migrating to FootballCMS

Faced with these challenges, FootballCMS turned out to be the perfect solution. 

Migrating to FootballCMS gave AjaxShowtime all the features its users were asking for and more. A native live blog, blazing fast live scores, a complete match center, a weekly prediction game, the possibility of embedding widgets of players, matches, and clubs right into articles.

The result of migrating to FootballCMS

So what has been the result of migrating to Newsifer?

• AjaxShowtime can entirely focus on writing top-quality content as FootballCMS takes care of the rest (weekly code and SEO updates, constantly releasing new features, and improving existing ones).
• 24% growth in traffic because of a faster website, more features, and better SEO.
• Higher user engagement led to more recurring traffic and a 30% growth in registered users.
• Zero downtime or slow loading pages of AjaxShowtime's website and mobile apps even during traffic peaks of up to 20.000+ real-time users.
• The editorial team can work more efficiently and can publish news articles about 60% faster than before.

Curious about what FootballCMS can do for your Football News website?  Book a free demo here, and we will show you!

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