8 Great Ways to Make Your Sports Club Website More Interactive

Your sports website is not just a place for sharing the latest news about your team or posting the results of your matches. Your website should help you connect with your fans and attract sponsors or donors. 

One of the best ways to do that is to make your site more interactive. In this post, we’ll explain how having an interactive website benefits your sports team and how you can make your site more interactive. 

How Having An Interactive Website Benefits Your Sports Team

An interactive website makes it easy for visitors to engage with your website through various interactive elements. This can be as simple as filling out a form or playing a video of your recent match. In other words, an interactive website requires visitors to interact with the content and this interaction has several benefits for your sports team. 

1. It encourages visitors to engage with your website

As mentioned earlier, an interactive website encourages visitors to interact with your website. This increases user engagement and keeps visitors on your site for a longer period of time. 

As a result, by spending more time on your site, your visitors can read more of your posts, watch more of your match replays, and generally, explore more of your content. 

2. An Interactive Website Makes You Stand Out

An interactive website is more unique which means it will stand out more. Once your website stands out among the competition, it becomes more memorable so you’ll have an easier time not only keeping visitors on your site longer but also getting them to return. 

3. An Interactive Website Offers a Better User Experience

Another reason why you should have an interactive website is because it provides your visitors with a better user experience. It gives them a chance to interact with your content instead of simply consuming it.

4. It Helps With Your SEO

As an added benefit, when search engines notice that visitors tend to return to your website and stay on there longer, they’ll start to see it as a relevant source of information and ranking it higher in the search engine result pages. 

How To Make Your Website More Interactive

Now that we’ve covered how an interactive website benefits your sports team, let’s go over how you can make it more interactive. 

1. Add Animation Effects Throughout Your Website

The first tip we have for you is to add animation effects throughout your website. This can include adding animations to your photo galleries, incorporating a slideshow or an animated countdown clock to your next match. 

2. Make Use Of SportsPress Features

Don’t forget that SportsPress has a number of different features that will help make your website more interactive. 

• For starters, you can display sortable league tables to display your standings. This simply begs visitors to click and sort the table to their liking. 
• Another interactive feature that SportsPress has, is the animated bar graph that will show you the match stats.
• You can also make use of SportsPress’ interactive tournament brackets to make your site more visually appealing. 
• Lastly, each player has a beautiful and dynamic player profile that automatically updates with career stats. 

3. Turn Email Addresses And Phone Numbers Into Clickable Items 

Even if you have a contact form on your site, you should list your email address and phone number for every visitor that prefers those means of communication to forms. You can make them clickable and allow visitors to instantly have their email client launch as they click on your email address or trigger your phone keyboard to call you on the spot. 

You can make your email address clickable in a few easy steps:

1. Edit your contact page in WordPress.
2. Make sure you’re on the Visual tab – not the Text tab.
3. Type out your email address as regular text
4. Highlight it, click the hyperlink symbol, and enter mailto:[email protected] (be sure to replace the dummy email with your actual email address. 
5. Update your page

Similarly, to make your phone number clickable, follow these steps: 

1. Edit your contact page in WordPress.
2. Make sure you’re on the Visual tab – not the Text tab.
3. Type out your phone number
4. Highlight it, click the hyperlink symbol again, and then enter tel:123456789 (be sure to replace the dummy phone number with your own)
5. Update your page. 

4. Add Quizzes or Polls

Another way to let your visitors interact with your content is to let them vote or participate in quizzes. You can use this not only to learn more about your website visitors in general but also to include them in the team’s happenings. This will foster a sense of community and make them feel even more connected to your team. 

You can use a plugin like Poll, Survey, Form & Quiz Maker by OpinionStage to create fun and interactive polls and buzzfeed style quizzes on your site for free. 

5. Add Gamification Features

A little gamification can go a long way towards boosting the engagement on your site and making it more interactive. For example, you could give your visitors points for actions they perform on your site. This can include leaving a comment, sharing your post, logging in, and more. 

You can use a plugin like GamiPress to define various achievements, organize requirements, and choose from a range of assessment options to determine whether each task or requirement has been successfully achieved. You can then let them redeem points for an item in your merch store, tickets for an upcoming match or for a chance to meet their favorite player.

6. Interlink Your Content

This is an easy one to implement: be sure to link to other posts and pages in your site whenever you can. This means you should link to other match results, player profiles, league tables, and more from each new piece of content you publish on your site. 

7. Add Live Chat

Consider adding a live chat box to your site. This makes it easy for visitors to initiate a chat with you whether they’re a fan or a potential sponsor. 

There is no shortage of WordPress plugins that will help you add this functionality to your site. A popular plugin for live chat is Tawk.To Live Chat. It’s free and allows you to monitor and chat with visitors on your WordPress site. 

8. Enable Push Notifications

Consider using a service like OneSignal to automatically notify subscribers when you publish a new match result or update any of your league tables, player profiles, and more. 

OneSignal will send a push notification to every visitor that opts in and make it easy for them to return to your website and engage with your content.

Final Thoughts

Making your website more interactive will not only help keep visitors on it longer but it will also increase user engagement and make you stand out from other sports teams in your area. 

Use the tips in this article to make your website more interactive and don’t forget to download our checklist outlining these tips.