FR12 is the largest news website and online community for Feyenoord fans in The Netherlands. With hundreds of thousands of visitors and thousands of posted comments (up to 10.000 per day) per day, it's the place to be to get in touch with other Feyenoord fans.
When FR12 started, it programmed its website and CMS themselves. They updated their code regularly. But as the code was not well enough optimized for many visitors, it became increasingly difficult for FR12 to cope with a large number of visitors and add new features because the code was outdated and increasingly challenging to maintain.
Because the website was not optimally programmed, it frequently occurred that the website was extremely slow or was down for several hours during peak moments. Also, the web hosting costs of FR12 kept rising.
FR12 wanted a new website for the following reasons:
The mobile apps (iOS and Android) needed more features, such as a liveblog and match center. It was important that all new features on the website would also work in the mobile apps.
FR12 faced the choice of building their own custom CMS and website again or finding another solution.An important requirement was that the new website would not only contain a lot of new features but would also be future-proof. So with well-maintained code and constant code and SEO updates.
FR12 decided to partner up with Newsifier because of their vast experience in growing news websites and the constant code and security updates to the Newsifier platform to keep it up to date. Newsifier also takes care of the hosting. So FR12 does not need to worry about the technical aspect of their company anymore.
The switch to Newsifier has exceeded FR12's expectations and has resulted in the following:
A lot of new features became available with the switch to Newsifier:
Due to the extensive experience of the Newsifier team with website migrations, the migration of FR12's website to Newsifier did not result in a loss of SEO traffic. On the contrary: it resulted in a big increase in SEO traffic (+92% within six months). Newsifier is technically 100% optimized for maximizing SEO traffic (Google Search and Google Discover). Its SEO features also allow publishers to SEO optimize their articles and pages themselves fully.
Users can give likes (just like with Facebook/Instagram) to comments by other users. This feature is used massively on FR12. In the first month, users gave more than a million likes. Based on these likes, lists are created with the users and comments with the most likes, which increases the community feeling and leads to a large number of returning visitors.
FR12 also wanted to offer her visitors the possibility to follow all matches live. For this purpose, FR12 uses Newsifier's extensive match center module. This match center also allows users to vote for the Man of the Match after every Feyenoord match.All match center features (matches, player and club profiles, voting for Man of the Match) are also embeddable in the articles themselves with one click, which adds a great deal of interaction on the website and the mobile apps.
To get users more engaged, FR12 also uses Newsifier's prediction game module. With this prediction game, the users can predict the matches selected by FR12 every week. The prediction game also provides interesting new monetizing possibilities, like cooperation with bookmakers.
There was a need for a new and reliable moderation system. With Newsifier's advanced moderation system, it has become easier to effectively manage the enormous flow of comments and keep out trolls. Moderators can, for example, shadowban users. Shadowbanned users can still see their comments, but their comments are no longer visible to anybody else on the website.
Users receive notifications (similar to Facebook/Instagram) when another user likes their comment or responds to their comment. These notifications are shown in the top bar on the website. And it is also possible to set up an email notification for likes and comments. This new feature has dramatically increased the engagement of users with the website and the number of comments per user.
A night mode was a major feature request by visitors of FR12, who also wanted to use their favourite website in the evening. The night mode can be enabled for both the website and the mobile apps.