Turning the Front Porch of Football into a D2C Growth Engine
For more than a century, the NFL has commanded the most passionate fan base in sports. But by 2024, its most visited digital property with 130M fans annually — NFL.com — was no longer keeping pace with how fans actually follow the game. Every Sunday, millions arrived with urgency: scores, schedules, injuries, and one simple question: how do I watch right now? Too often, they bounced to find the answer elsewhere.
The issue wasn’t fandom. It was fragmentation. Fans weren’t abandoning football; they were abandoning the NFL’s own digital front door for faster, clearer alternatives across social, video platforms and aggregators. At the same time, the league was making a decisive shift toward direct-to-consumer growth, with NFL+ at its center. The website wasn’t designed to support NFL+ discovery, explain value or convert intent into action.
Using the design system we built in 2024 with the NFL (and currently powering the NFL app) we rebuilt NFL.com into a modern DTC platform — one that moves at the speed of fans' obsession. In parallel, the reimagined website now meets critical business needs for the NFL, fueling subscription growth and giving the league a foundation for the next era of football.
Impact
- 3× increase in NFL+ acquisition rate; NFL+ discovery grew +104% YoY.
- Clicks to game pages increased +138%.
- Page load speed increased +267%.
- Integrating the new design system improved speed of design to developer handoff by 30%, having a massive effect on overhead.
Key Takeaways
- We rebuilt NFL.com around fan urgency, helping fans instantly find games, scores and ways to watch, which drove year-over-year gains across every engagement metric.
- Our unified design system fuels speed, consistency and governance across every NFL touchpoint — delivering a cohesive, unmistakably NFL experience for fans.
- We restructured the information architecture and engineered pages for SEO dominance, propelling new features and pages to the top of Google within 48 hours.
Aligning fan needs with business priorities
Research revealed a fundamental truth: web fandom behaves differently than app fandom. Apps reward loyalty. The web serves moments. Fans don’t browse NFL.com — they arrive with intent, urgency and little patience.
We also uncovered a critical business gap: NFL+ was largely invisible during moments of highest fan intent. The league’s largest digital surface had unmatched scale, but no strategic way to turn information-seeking into decision-making.
Inspired by these insights, we developed a strategy reframing NFL.com around three principles:
• Build a future-proof foundation: new architecture, new code, modern SEO and a unified design system to power every team, page and game.
• Design for fan behavior: reorganize the experience around high-intent moments — scores, schedules, standings and game details.
• Guide decisions, don’t interrupt: make NFL+ discoverable through contextual, relevant touchpoints woven seamlessly into the experience.
This aligned fan needs with the NFL’s most important business priority.
Launching a real-time decision engine
We transformed NFL.com from a static information hub into a real-time decision engine.
Today the experience responds to where fans are, what’s happening in the game and what they need next.
At its core is Ways to Watch — a universal utility that instantly tells fans exactly how to watch any game, anywhere, based on time, location, rights, team affinity and subscription status. No searching. No guessing. No bouncing.
Paired with a fully reimagined design system and adaptive component library, the site now surfaces NFL+ precisely where intent is highest — within schedules, scores, previews, recaps and team pages. The result is clarity instead of clutter, positioning the NFL as a fan's trusted guide.
Powering the future of the game
Even as direct site traffic declines across the web at large, every one of the NFL's website experience metrics are way up across engagement, discoverability and NFL+ subscription growth. It's a testament to the league's pulse on evolving fan behavior and its commitment to prioritizing the customer experience to power the future of the game.