Home of Hockey: 700,000 pageviews in the first month

eishockey.at is no ordinary corporate website. It serves fans, players, clubs, media, parents, coaches, referees, partners and officials simultaneously. It is a news outlet, results service, federation portal, document repository and gateway to tickets and merchandise all in one.

The previous website could no longer adequately meet users’ different needs. Orientation, usability and content discoverability needed to improve. The Game Center was particularly important as the central destination for schedules, results and statistics.

The relaunch was to bring news, federation information, sports data and the shop together in one clear interface and make access easier on mobile devices. At the same time, the extensive news archive had to be preserved and the foundations laid for better search engine visibility.

The goal was to bring the new platform online before the season started in early September — within a very short timeframe. There were barely two months between the project’s start and the planned public launch, which had to be used to the full to meet the tight schedule.

Our thesis was clear: postponing multilingual content, the archive, commerce and sports data to a second phase does not make a relaunch fast. These are precisely the elements that determine whether such a platform fulfils its role. So they belonged in the first production release.

Structure first. The information architecture shrank from ten main navigation items to six clear entry points: The ÖEHV, National Teams, News, Partners, Shop and Game Center. Search, language selection and the shopping cart remain visible as independent tools. Navigation thus follows the most common user situations rather than internal responsibilities.

A brand that dares. The new visual identity presents the ÖEHV as a confident sports brand: large-scale imagery, clear typography, precise contrasts and focused calls to action. The layout is designed just as deliberately on a phone as on a large screen. Home of Hockey captures the ambition in three words.

Sports data, news and shop under one roof. The crucial step was connecting the ÖEHV’s different offerings into a shared platform. The editorial team manages content in Payload CMS, the shop runs on Shopify, and the Game Center integrates sports data. A shared Next.js frontend brings this content together in German and English. For users, design and navigation remain familiar throughout, whether they are reading a match report, checking results or browsing the shop.

The Game Center, rethought. It was developed as a dedicated part of the platform. Integrating multiple sports data sources through their APIs was particularly technically demanding. Differently structured data had to be consolidated and teams, players, leagues and seasons reliably matched. The result was a shared interface for schedules, results, standings, top scorers, goalkeeper statistics, team pages, player profiles, match reports and archives, from the ICE to the Alps Hockey League and youth leagues. A two-tier last-good cache keeps the last successful view available, bounded concurrency protects data providers, and dedicated loading and error states ensure that one provider’s outage does not take down the entire website.

A shop without breaking the experience. Shopify remains the commerce backend and checkout, while product presentation, variant selection and the shopping cart live directly in the new frontend. Until checkout, users stay in the same brand and navigation environment. The ÖEHV retains control over products, prices, taxes, shipping and payment methods.

Discoverability from the start. Unambiguous page URLs, German and English language alternatives, an automatically updated sitemap and structured data for news, products, events and person profiles were part of the blueprint. External embeds load only when users actively open them.

The old website held almost 2,000 articles: match reports, tournament results, tables and photos from many years of Austrian ice hockey. For fans, clubs and media, this archive is a collective memory. The report on the first international match, the standings of a long-past season, the photo of an awards ceremony. None of it could disappear during the move.

The problem: the old system could not simply be exported. There was no button that would deliver the content cleanly. So we recovered the archive piece by piece, from the old website itself and, additionally, from the Internet Archive, and rebuilt it completely.

The result is verifiable: all 1,980 articles were fully migrated without any content discrepancies. Tables remained tables rather than unreadable walls of text, images and PDFs were preserved, and 2,259 old links still lead to their destination instead of dropping visitors on an error page.

The archive then gained a second language. A controlled AI process translated the content into English, with special protection for numbers, results and links, and editorial approval rather than automatic publication. This made the federation’s history accessible to an English-speaking audience too.

In the first month after launch, the platform recorded around 700,000 pageviews with around 7 pageviews per visit. Average session duration was 8+ minutes, and the bounce rate was 12 percent.

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 700,000 pageviews in the first month
• 7 pageviews per visit
• 63,960 Google clicks in the first 28 days
• 14 active competitions + 3 youth archives in the Game Center
• Over 82,000 URLs across the entire platform, including news, shop and federation pages
• 1,980 migrated blog articles