Part 1: For Decision-Makers
Why a website relaunch paid off for the Vienna Capitals
The old website of the Vienna Capitals ran on Contao, a content management system that the club had been using since 2011. The design was from 2015. For its time, the site was solid. But a presence that is ten years old eventually pays for it with real disadvantages. For the Capitals, these disadvantages showed up in three areas, all directly related to money and fan engagement.
First: mobile display. Most fans check their phones for when the next home game is, what the score is, or who is injured. The old site was never properly built for small screens. Texts were hard to read, menus cumbersome, and content jumped around. If someone gets stuck on their phone, they won't come back.
Second: accessibility. A website should work for everyone, including people with visual impairments or those who navigate without a mouse. This is not just a matter of decency, but also of reach. The old site did not meet this standard to the extent that it should today.
Third: sales channels. Shop, ticketing, and hospitality offers were poorly visible on the site. If someone can't find where to buy tickets or a jersey, they won't buy. That meant lost revenue, game after game.
Additionally, there was something that is harder to measure in euros but counts just as much for a club: player profiles. They were just a table. Name, number, position, done. No story, no personality, nothing for fans to identify with. Ice hockey thrives on faces and characters. A table does not build emotional connections.
So, a website relaunch paid off for the Vienna Capitals not just because the site became more beautiful. It paid off because sales channels became visible, fans stayed on their phones, and players finally appeared as real people.
What decision-makers should know before a CMS switch
A CMS switch sounds like a technical topic. In reality, it is a business decision, and it should be made as such. From our experience, there are three questions that boards and management should clarify beforehand. Good relaunch consulting takes them seriously before the first line of code is written.
How does it pay off?
A relaunch costs money and ties up time in your own team. Against that, there are several items: higher sales revenues because the shop and tickets are visible, less effort in everyday life because the editorial team no longer has to wait for developers, and lower follow-up costs because a modern system is easier to maintain than a 15-year-old one. Ongoing operation also matters: The Capitals' website runs on a European cloud server and costs only a fraction of what is typical with large cloud providers. The data remains within the EU. It is important to make this calculation honestly and not just see the project costs.
How much time does the own team need?
A relaunch is not a project that you hand off to an agency and pick up after four months. Content needs to be reviewed, decisions made, texts and images approved. At the Capitals, this worked well because there were fixed points of contact who could decide quickly. Plan this time in the club from the start.
All at once or step by step?
This is the question of risk. In a so-called big bang switch, the old system is switched to the new one on a specific date. This is risky: If something goes wrong, everyone notices immediately. The alternative is a gradual migration. For the Capitals, we designed the rollout so that it happened seamlessly and without downtime. Fans essentially only noticed that everything worked better. We secured this with load tests under real game day conditions, even before going live, and with monitoring afterwards.
And what came out of it? Here are a few numbers we like to mention:
- More than 5,000 visitors on game days, without performance breaking down. Especially on game day, when the pressure on the site is greatest, it runs stably.
- About 30 articles per month, created and published independently by the editorial team. No detours through developers, no tickets, no waiting time.
- Significantly fewer inquiries to development. This is due to our CMS-first approach: We build the system first so that the editorial team can handle as much as possible themselves. Developers are then needed only when something truly new arises, not for every text change.
For decision-makers, this is the real gain. It’s not about a new look. It’s about the people in the club who work with the website daily truly mastering it.
Which team was behind the relaunch
Many clubs expect a large project team for a relaunch. For the Vienna Capitals, a small, well-coordinated team was sufficient: a developer, a designer, and a solution architect from LEAN-CODERS GmbH. The designer thought about the site from the fans' perspective, from mobile use on game day to the new player profiles. The developer built it. The solution architect ensured that all decisions fit together and that the architecture would still hold up in five years.
Short communication paths are the big advantage of this setup. Anyone working as a website relaunch agency does not have to send every decision through three departments. The club always had the same contacts, and conversely, we knew the club's concerns firsthand.
The project lasted four months, from the first concept to go-live. But that wasn't the end: We continuously support the website, handle maintenance and further development, and we are connected to the Vienna Capitals as a sponsorship partner. This is important to us because a website is not a project with an expiration date. It grows with the club.
For those who want to see the project in brief, all key data can be found in our Case Study on the Vienna Capitals Website.
How this was technically implemented will be shown in the next part.
Part 2: The Technical Part
How the Vienna Capitals Transitioned from Contao to a Modern Architecture
When someone wants to relaunch a website, they face the fundamental question early on: modernize the existing system or rethink the architecture? For the Capitals, the answer was clear. Contao, in use since 2011, tightly couples content and presentation. This makes it difficult to design pages flexibly, and any major change to the layout means code adjustments.
Therefore, we switched the site to a decoupled architecture: Astro as the frontend and Strapi 5 as the headless CMS.
Astro is a framework that delivers pages as lean HTML and only loads JavaScript where it is truly needed. For a content-rich site like that of the Capitals, this is ideal: articles, player profiles, and game schedules are predominantly content, not a web app. The result is small pages that load quickly.
Strapi 5 delivers the content via API. A headless CMS manages only the content: texts, images, player data, page structures. How this content looks on the website is determined by the frontend. This allows both sides to be developed independently, and the same content model can later serve an app or other channels. For those who want to delve deeper into the topic, we have more on headless CMS solutions.
We particularly valued the block-based page builder in Strapi 5. Instead of rigid page templates, we provide the editorial team with a toolbox of blocks: text blocks, image galleries, player cards, sponsor areas, call-to-actions. The editorial team assembles pages from these, rearranges them, and publishes them without needing a developer ticket. This is exactly the lever behind the roughly 30 articles per month that the team now produces independently.
Technically, this means: Each block is a separate component in the frontend and a clearly defined data model in the CMS. New block types can be added by the developer without touching existing pages. The editorial team then simply gets a new tool in the toolbox.
Player profiles also run through the CMS. About 30 players and coaches are set up as individual content items, with position, height, weight, birth date, and nationality. The previous table has thus become a real roster overview that the editorial team maintains themselves and can expand at any time with photos, videos, or additional information. Image and video material can be integrated without slowing down the site.
In the background, a classic but clean stack operates: PostgreSQL as the database, all services continue to run as Docker containers and are isolated from each other. We do not have to build the Docker images ourselves: That is handled by Dokploy, a self-operated deployment platform that manages builds, rollouts, and the operation of the containers. It is hosted on a Hetzner Cloud Server. With this infrastructure, we can operate the website at a fraction of the cost that would be incurred with large cloud services, and all of this within the EU.
How the website remains stable even on game days with thousands of visitors
A game day is the ultimate stress test for a club website. Everyone wants to know the same thing at the same time, and they want it now. Anyone looking to improve core web vitals, the metrics Google uses to evaluate page loading speed, stability, and responsiveness, cannot rely on chance. We rely on two components.
Redis caching. Data that rarely changes but is frequently queried does not need to be fetched anew from the CMS with every request. We keep API data and finished HTML responses in Redis, a fast in-memory store, and deliver them from there. This massively relieves the CMS and the database. Whether ten or several thousand fans access the site simultaneously makes little difference to the system.
imgproxy for images. Images are usually the largest chunk of a page. imgproxy converts them to the modern WebP format as needed and dynamically crops them to the size that the respective device requires. A mobile phone does not receive an image in desktop resolution. The editorial team uploads an original image, and the infrastructure takes care of the rest.
The results can be measured:
- Loading time of around 0.5 seconds
- Lighthouse SEO: around 100/100
- Lighthouse Accessibility: around 100/100
The last point brings us back to the initial situation. The accessibility that was missing on the old site is now measurable at a top level. And the speed holds up even when visitor numbers rise on game day.
How real-time game scores were technically integrated
For hockey fans, the live score is the most important information. The data comes from CapsCore, through which we integrated game schedules and statistics into the website. This includes live scores and real-time updates during the game.
The challenge lies less in retrieving the data than in reliability under load. When thousands of fans update the score every minute, the third-party interface must not become a bottleneck. That's why this data also goes through our caching layer and is updated selectively, rather than each visitor querying the provider individually. This keeps updates current and the site fast.
In addition to CapsCore, other third-party providers are integrated: Shopify for the merchandise shop and Mailgun for email delivery. Both are conscious decisions for proven specialists rather than in-house solutions. The shop runs on a platform specifically designed for that purpose, and the site remains lean because we don't build every function ourselves. For the fans, everything feels like a performance. Technically, several specialized systems work together seamlessly.
Frequently Asked Questions about the Website Relaunch
How much does a website relaunch cost?
The costs for a website depend less on the number of pages than on four questions: How complex are the content and design? Which systems need to be integrated, such as shop, ticketing, or live data? How much content will be migrated? And how much functionality should the editorial team be able to manage themselves? A simple site with a few pages is significantly cheaper than a project with live data, shop integration, and a custom page builder. A serious price can only be given after a discussion about goals and scope. Don't just calculate the project costs, but also include ongoing costs for operation and maintenance.
How long does it take to relaunch a website?
It depends on the scope. For the Vienna Capitals, the project took four months, from the first concept to go-live, with a team of developers, designers, and a solution architect. Anyone looking to relaunch their website should also plan time in-house: for content, feedback, and approvals. Often, it is these discussions that determine the duration, not the development itself.
What should you pay attention to in relaunch consulting?
Good relaunch consulting does not start with technology, but with your goals: What should the site achieve, who works with it daily, where are you currently missing out on revenue? Make sure someone explains the risks to you, such as a big bang or gradual transition, and that the editorial team is involved from the start. And ask about the time after go-live: Who will manage the site once it’s running? You can read about how we experienced the handover to the editorial team during our own website relaunch in our Experience report on the Definition of Done.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are metrics from Google that describe how a website feels for visitors. They evaluate three things: how quickly the main content becomes visible, how quickly the page responds to inputs, and how stable the layout remains during loading, meaning whether elements shift. Good values help visitors because the site functions smoothly, and they factor into the site's evaluation by Google.
Your website relaunch: Let's talk about it
Are you considering modernizing your website and want to know what that means for your club or company? In the discovery call, we will clarify goals, scope, and the right path together, without any technical jargon.
Your website relaunch starts with a conversation
