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Insights

West Ham FC Ticketing Website Gets the Red Card

On Thursday 4th February 2016, West Ham United Football Club's official ticketing system, http://www.whufcboxoffice.com, was displaying the following queuing page to visitors:

 

Website Load Testing

We noticed this after seeing an advert in the morning Metro newspaper. The advert was informing readers that it was potentially their last chance to purchase FA Cup tickets at the Boleyn Ground before the team move to the Olympic Stadium next season. In particular there was an FA Cup replay fixture against Liverpool with available tickets.

 

Website Response Times

 

This is likely to be one of the causes for the upsurge in traffic to the website. I have currently been ‘In the queue’ for several hours and counting. This suggests there are potentially some real underlying issues with the site. In other attempts to access the site we were presented with the following page:

 

Website Capacity Monitoring

 The queuing page would have been put in place by the website, in an attempt to control the level of traffic. West Ham fans displayed their anger at the club via twitter.

Capacity and Performance Planning Tools

 

If you want to find out how to avoid this happening to your own website then please read our article with some top tips:

https://www.capacitas.co.uk/blog/why-do-so-many-websites-fail-on-black-friday

If you would like to learn more about our Prepare for Peak and Performance testing solutions, please click below, to see our latest Ebook.

Guide to ensuring website performance during trading peaks