From kit launch to ticket sales: Top 6 website mistakes football clubs make before high traffic events

Launching a new kit isn’t just about the shirt — it’s about the experience and the digital journey has become crucial to kit launch success. But too often, clubs make mistakes when preparing their online stores that lead to frustration, lost sales, and missed brand moments. Here are the top 6 mistakes we see when helping leading football clubs prepare for online kit launch and other high demand events:

1. Leaving Performance Testing too late

Too many clubs leave it too late to begin testing, assuming one test will be enough. But by then, it’s often too late and more costly to fix underlying performance issues. High-pressure events like kit launches demand precision — and preparation. Performance Testing needs to start early in the planning phase, giving clubs time to involve multiple departments in the planning process, identify weak points, implement changes and re-test after fixes, ensuring improvements actually work. Treat Performance Testing as an integral part of launch planning — not a final checkbox

2. Not Load Testing real user behaviour under real-world conditions

Kit drops and ticket sales drive serious website traffic with Football Clubs experiencing substantial peaks way beyond usual baseline traffic. Demand spikes within minutes of going live. And with a global fanbase it's further complicated, with supporters accessing the site from multiple regions and time zones. If user journeys haven't been load tested under realistic traffic scenarios, it’s vulnerable to slowdowns, errors, and checkout failures — all of which lead to fan frustration and lost revenue. Clubs need to simulate end-to end journeys replicating real-user behaviour as well as Load Testing against realistic traffic profiles well in advance.

3. Assuming autoscaling will cope with peak demand

Autoscaling sounds like a safety net — but it isn’t a silver bullet. Scaling up infrastructure rarely works effectively straight out of the box; it requires careful preparation, including steps like cache warming. Clubs often assume the tech will “just work”, but without fine-tuning and real-world Load Testing, the system can still falter under fan pressure — right when it matters most. Learn more about kit launch autoscaling issues in our Premier League case study.

4. Overlooking 3rd party integrations

From payment providers to personalisation tools, a football club’s online store relies on multiple third-party integrations. If any of these underperform or fail under pressure, it impacts the entire fan experience. Yet many clubs don’t monitor the end-to-end journey from the fan’s point of view, meaning issues are only discovered after supporters start complaining. You may want to consider disabling any non-essential third-party add-ons for the duration of peak demand.

5. Neglecting mobile experience

A huge portion of fans engage via mobile — and mobile networks are less forgiving. If an eCommerce site hasn’t been optimised for mobile traffic during peak, fans will abandon fast. Clubs need to prepare for the mobile kit drop as much as desktop and monitor journeys for both after going live, using the same ioS and Android browsers as site visitors use.

6. Not proactively monitoring real-world fan journeys

Once the site is live, it’s too late to discover something’s broken. Without real-time, intelligent monitoring of fan journeys — from landing page to checkout — clubs can’t spot or fix issues quickly. Monitoring solutions that track what fans are actually experiencing act as an early warning system and are essential to detect errors and customer experience issues before they escalate into bigger problems.

Further Resources

Want to make sure your club avoids these website mistakes prior to kit launch?

Download our kit launch preparation eBook.

Discover how to optimise customer experience & protect online revenue for kit launch and other high profile events.

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Read our Premier League case study

Learn how we helped a Premier League Club uncover an autoscaling issue preventing kit launch chaos with real-world Load Testing.

READ FULL CASE STUDY