Case study · Sports club · Emlichheim
From WordPress page builder to Bundesliga website: relaunch for SCU Emlichheim Volleyball
SC Union Emlichheim has been playing Bundesliga volleyball since 1989/90 – the website didn't look the part. Web & Search rebuilt scuvolleyball.de from scratch: standings, results and Instagram posts update themselves, the site works without a cookie banner and scores 96 out of 100 for mobile performance, plus 100 each for accessibility, best practices and SEO.
Key facts
- Client
- SC UNION Emlichheim Marketing GmbH / SC Union Emlichheim e. V., volleyball department
- League
- 1st women's team in the Sparda 2. Liga Pro, 15 teams in the club
- Project
- Complete relaunch, from concept to go-live
- Live since
- 16 September 2026
- Tech
- Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, Vercel
- Website
- scuvolleyball.de
Starting point
The starting point
The old site ran on WordPress with the Elementor page builder. Content such as the standings, fixtures and roster had to be updated by hand and was often out of date as a result. Embedded Facebook content made a cookie banner necessary, and the server took 0.8 seconds on average before the first byte even arrived. Over the years, 36 pages and around 810 blog posts had piled up.
For a club competing in Germany's second-highest division and wanting to give its sponsors a stage, that wasn't enough.
The goal
A site that largely keeps itself up to date during the season, is fast on phones, gives sponsors and the supporters' association visibility – and that the club can run day to day without an agency.
Implementation
What we built
Data that maintains itself
- The league table and results of the 1st women's team come straight from the official Volleyball Bundesliga interface and update automatically.
- The fixtures of both Bundesliga teams (24 and 22 matches) can be subscribed to as a calendar with one click – new dates land on your phone automatically.
- The news page and the home page show the club's latest Instagram posts in their familiar look. The club posts as usual, and the website follows.
Privacy without a banner
- The server fetches the Instagram posts, and the images are served from the club's own domain too. Visitors' browsers never contact Meta.
- Visitor analytics with Umami: cookieless and also served from the club's own domain.
- The result: the site sets no cookies and needs no cookie banner.
Content with substance
- 15 team pages from the Bundesliga down to the minis, profiles for all 11 players of the 1st women's team, coaching and management staff with photos from the season shoot.
- Dedicated pages for the supporters' association (with a copyable donation account and a membership form), the Vechtetalhalle arena, a gallery and the club's history as a timeline since 1989/90.
- 24 sponsors with logo and link, plus a clear path to the right contact instead of rigid packages.
- All details – leagues, rosters, match dates, ticket prices – checked against the official VBL and DVV sources.
A clean move
- Every address of the old site permanently redirects to the matching new page: 36 pages and around 810 blog posts, covered by 41 redirect rules. No search result and no partner link leads nowhere.
- Structured data for the club, the team and every single match, so Google understands the fixtures.
Results
The results in numbers
Measured with Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile, three days after go-live.
Re-measured
After go-live comes optimisation
Three days after launch, mobile performance was at 87 and accessibility at 88 points. The analysis revealed the cause: the headline and text in the header waited for JavaScript and only became visible after 2.7 seconds, even though the server had responded in 10 milliseconds. After switching to pure CSS animations, the content appears with the first paint; the Speed Index dropped from 4.7 to 1.1 seconds. For accessibility, the main issue was weak contrast – yellow text on white surfaces – which we fixed systematically across all page types.
The example shows how we work: measure, find the cause, fix it, measure again.
| Metric (mobile) | Before optimisation | After optimisation |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 87 | 96 |
| Accessibility | 88 | 100 |
| Speed Index | 4.7 s | 1.1 s |