Vital Football News Portal Redesign Case Study

Client

Vital Football is an independent sports media platform about English football: news, analysis and blogs about Premier League, Championship and lower-division clubs. The platform relies on a loyal fan audience and advertising, so reading comfort and stable ad performance are equally important to it.

Challenges

The site needed a redesign: the news portal had to become faster, visually modern and mobile-friendly, with a clear content structure, while still earning ad revenue without sacrificing performance.

The portal's audience includes football fans and club communities, journalists and analysts who publish content, and advertisers targeting a sports audience.

Speed and mobile: a new responsive design for different screens.
Convenient navigation: updated logic for news, club and article pages.
Organized content: a unified system of categories and tags by league, team and analysis pieces.
Monetization without slowdowns: Teads and Taboola ads that don't slow the site down.
Transparent analytics: event tracking and ad unit performance measurement.

Solution

Audit of the old interface. We examined the previous design and found weak spots in the site's structure and performance.
Prototypes designed for readers. We designed the news pages, club sections and blog with a focus on navigation and visual hierarchy.
Fast rendering with styled-components. The responsive interface was built with styled-components 5.3.6: styles are reused and pages render faster. The new templates were integrated into WordPress along with media content optimization.
Ads under analytics control. We connected Teads and Taboola together with Oracle Moat, while Google Tag Manager collects user events.
Load testing. We tested rendering speed, ad delivery, GTM events and mobile behavior, backing every stage with PageSpeed measurements.

Results

+41% page load speed thanks to styled-components and resource optimization.
+35% page views thanks to the new UX and content structure.
+27% brand visibility in Google in the first three months.
Full analytics via Google Tag Manager and Oracle Moat.
Teads and Taboola ad units run without any loss of performance.

Technical details

Platform: WordPress, PHP, MySQL, styled-components 5.3.6, Nginx.
Integrations: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Oracle Moat, Teads, Taboola.

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