Festival and event website design

A festival website gets most of its visitors in the busiest weeks: when tickets go on sale, when the programme is announced, and during the event, when everyone checks on their phone who is playing when and where. I have worked on the websites of two festivals in Transylvania, and both asked for the same structure – in a different style.

What does a festival website need?

A programme by day and venue, performer profiles with a photo and short description, ticket purchase or a button to the ticketing partner, a venue map, a countdown, news and press materials, and sponsor logos. I describe this structure on the event websites service page, and wrote about the programme-tickets-map trio in a separate article. The point: the visitor reaches the ticket within three clicks, on mobile too. The programme should be filterable by day and venue, and one click from a performer's page should lead to their slot – two details missing from most festival websites.

Festivals I have worked on

The website of Humorfeszt, a stand-up comedy festival in Cluj-Napoca, features the performers, the three-day programme, a countdown and ticket purchase – built so the same structure can be reused with new content next year. The trilingual (Hungarian-Romanian-English) site of the Early Music Festival of Miercurea Ciuc, running since 1980, includes the programme, the summer university with masterclasses, tickets and an archive of past editions.

A structure you reuse year after year

A festival website is not a one-off campaign page: you need it next year too, with a new date and line-up. So the programme and performers are editable from the admin without technical help, and past editions remain as an archive. This matters for Google too: the site keeps the visibility built up over the years. A new edition becomes a content update, not a rebuild.

Traffic spikes and ticket release

In the hour tickets go on sale, traffic can be many times the usual. I prepare with LiteSpeed cache, optimised images and an external ticketing integration, so the site does not slow down at the crucial moment. If tickets are sold in your own system, that works on WooCommerce with Romanian card payment – then we load-test beforehand. During the event it is the same: thousands of people open the programme at once, so the site must load within seconds even on a weak mobile connection.

Multiple languages and prices

In Transylvania, Hungarian-Romanian bilingualism is the baseline, and with international performers English is the third language – each with its own URL and search settings. A festival website typically starts at 2,500 RON, like a business website; the exact price depends on the complexity of the programme and ticketing, and the starting points are on the pricing page. The first consultation is free, and I send a concrete quote within a day.