How to Make an Esports Tournament Website?

Want a great guide to help you build an esports tournament website? You’ve come to the right place.

The global esports market volume is expected to reach 2.235 billion US dollars by 2027 with an expected number of users to reach 720.80 million.

Before diving into the website development details for this financially lucrative industry, let’s look at some of the essential features of an esports website. This will give you an idea of what type of esports tournament website you want to develop for your esports audience.

Features of an Esports Tournaments Website

A website for professional gaming tournaments should have the following features:

• Users should be able to view match reports of online tournaments.
• Users should be able to find schedules of online gaming tournaments easily.
• Esports enthusiasts should be able to use the website to enlist new enthusiasts and players.
• Players and the biggest esports tournament organizers need easy ways to create and run their tournaments.
• Comparing players and teams is important in the esports community. Leaderboards are popular for this purpose. Users should easily be able to create leaderboards.
• The multiplayer online battle arena is the most-watched genre of esports. Make sure to incorporate this feature.
• Prize pool crowdfunding feature for esports leagues.
• Social networking is a vital part of esports events. Any esports website should allow users to create their own social networks. Chat features are needed. Forums and activity feeds are also important features.
• Users should be able to buy esports-related merchandise.
• A simple yet elegant UI is key.
• Finally, it goes without saying that in today’s era, a website should be performant on all the operating systems it is released for.

Take a look at the following popular esports tournament website:

Battlefy

Battlefy is a popular esports tournament website for gamers to create and compete in esports tournaments. The platform offers a range of popular games, including League of Legends and Dota 2. Users can select the region they are in and the platform they prefer.

The website also shows schedules of upcoming tournaments. Players can organize tournaments for a game of their choice and include features like automatic score reporting, match stats, etc.

Visit the Battlefy platform to learn more about appealing esports website features that you can add to your application. 

How to Create an Esports Tournament Website Without Coding

What if you are an entrepreneur in a hurry and don’t have a skilled web development team? Well, you can still build and launch your website for esports tournaments.

I will now explain how to build an esports games website without coding.

No-coding option #1: Esports website builder

As you may have guessed, this option requires using a tournament website builder.

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You can try the following options:

A. Toornament tournaments website builder

Toornament is a suite of tools for tournament organizers, agencies, studios, and publishers to create and manage esports tournaments. It offers various products, including a website builder to easily create and publish a tournament site.

Toornament website builder offers multiple layouts to create single-page and multi-page websites and display content in unique ways to reflect your brand identity. Users can configure visual elements to style a theme in their own ways.

Users do not have to worry about the technical aspects of the website as Toornament hosts the tournament website and ensures its availability and security. Visit the Toornament website for more details on using their website builder solution.

B. MotoCMS: A CMS (Content Management System) to build an esports gaming website

MotoCMS is a CMS (Content Management System). It offers the MotoCMS Esports website builder, which is a hassle-free way to build your esports tournament or esports team website.

MotoCMS offers the following features:

• A drag-and-drop page builder;
• Useful esports website templates;
• Social media integration;
• A comprehensive set of modules and widgets;
• Responsive and mobile-friendly design;
• All key features needed in esports tournament websites;
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-friendly features;
• Comprehensive support.

Check out the MotoCMS pricing plans.

Zero-coding option #2: WordPress

The popular open-source ‘Content Management System’ (CMS) WordPress is another good option for entrepreneurs without access to skilled developers.

You can build a basic esports tournaments website using WordPress themes and plugins. Themes control the look and feel of the website, whereas plugins address functionalities. WordPress is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Which WordPress theme can you use?

PixieFreak is a good WordPress theme for esports tournament websites. The theme has robust customization options. You can use the smart widgets that this theme offers.

You can also use customization options offered by this theme, for example, to help users present esports teams. The features enable you to organize tournaments. You can create esports communities too.

The theme has good integration with WooCommerce, i.e., a popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. This enables you to set up an online shop and sell esports merchandise. It’s easy to customize the colors. Moreover, it’s a responsive theme.

Which WordPress plugin can you use?

I also recommend the “MSP – MultiSport & eSport” WordPress plugin. Managing esports content is easy when using this useful tool. You can incorporate powerful esports statistics with the help of this plugin. The plugin also comes bundled with the popular Visual Composer WordPress page builder. You can easily integrate it into your website, thanks to excellent documentation.

Which web hosting provider can you use?

With this approach, you will need to buy web hosting.

You have several choices. However, we recommend InMotion Hosting.

The company enjoys a very good reputation with experts. It’s a highly optimized and managed WordPress hosting platform. You can buy a premium plan from InMotion Hosting, which includes free domain name registration.

The fees to make an esports platform with this approach include hosting, theme, and plugin. You will need web designers. However, you don’t need to hire developers.

How to Develop an Esports Tournament Website With Custom-Coding

In order to offer unique features that really make your site stand out, you will need to develop a website for esports tournaments using the custom development approach. I will explain this approach now.

The custom-development approach to creating an esports platform

You need to do the following:

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1. Design a compelling ‘User Interface’ (UI).
2. Engage a ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) provider so that you can remain focused on your development.
3. Develop the website with custom coding.
4. Use ‘Application Programming Interfaces’ (APIs) for common functions.

A website is a ‘System of Engagement’ (SoE), i.e., a customer-facing system. Such applications undergo frequent enhancement. Therefore, iterative development is imperative.

“Agile” methodology fits well here. You need to organize your team into an Agile team. Use our guide “How to Build an Agile development team” for help.

A development team to create a website for esports tournaments

You need to assemble a team with the following skills:

• Business analysts;
• UI/UX designers: HTML and CSS skills are important;
• Web developers with good expertise in popular web development languages like Java, NodeJS, PHP, or JavaScript;
• Testers;
• A project manager (PM).

The PM should know modern project management methodologies and best practices well. Use our guides to project management methodologies. You can also read our guide to project management best practices.

Choose a PaaS provider

Start-ups often don’t have the funds to invest in infrastructure and software licensing. The ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) model of cloud computing comes in handy for them as it dramatically reduces costs.

A PaaS provider manages the cloud infrastructure, networking, security, middleware, operating system (OS), database, scalability, and runtime environments.

This leaves our entrepreneurs to focus on application development and application data. The result is a quick ‘Time to Market’ for the product with much reduced up-front investment. I recommend you engage a PaaS provider.

There are several reputed PaaS providers to choose from. I recommend you use Heroku PaaS. You can sign up with them for a fee.

Once you have done this, you can choose your preferred runtime environment, e.g., Java. You can also select a database.

You can use the 3^rd party APIs they provide, alternatively, you can buy APIs from another provider and integrate them into your website built on Heroku or other such platforms.

You can also use a DevOps tool suite to automate your testing, build management, and deployment.

Consume APIs for common functions

To expedite your development further, I recommend you use APIs for common functions. Consider the following APIs:

Toornament APIs

Toornament, the esports tournament website, also provides APIs. Developers can use them to build several functionalities on their websites.

With the Toornament APIs, you can incorporate the following features:

• Collect and publish tournament information;
• Get information for esports fans;
• List matches for an esports event;
• List schedules of tournaments;
• Create and manage tournaments;
• Register a user for a tournament and manage their participation in it.

You can consult Toornament API tutorials. The company offers a “how-to” guide for its APIs. You can also use the Toornament API “Get Started” guide.

SportRadar API

SportRadar provides APIs to access data of games, including the biggest esports tournaments, like League of Legends, Dota 2, etc. APIs provide information on tournament schedules, team profiles, game scores, game summaries, etc. For games like Counter-Strike, it provides data on maps, kill details, etc.

SportRadar also provides comprehensive documentation to get started with their APIs. The documentation for every API includes information on the following:

• A list of endpoints for an API with information on every endpoint;
• Syntax info that explains how to access each endpoint with an API;
• Code examples in various programming languages, etc.

You can consult the Sportradar API documentation for more information. Contact the company via its homepage for pricing information.

PandaScore APIs

PandaScore provides APIs for esports data. You can use them to create an esports platform. You can include real-time esports data on your website with these APIs. They cover many popular esports, including world championship tournaments.

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These APIs can provide players, teams, matches, and tournaments. You can stream live esports data using these APIs.

Check out the PandaScore API documentation. Review PandaScore API pricing plans here.

Managing the esports tournament website development

I recommend you use the proven ‘Scrum’ methodology, which is a part of the larger Agile methodology. In this technique, you organize your team as follows:

• ‘Scrum master’, i.e., the PM;
• ‘Product owner’ (PO), i.e., the stakeholder who provides requirements in a document called the ‘Product backlog’;
• The cross-functional scrum team with developers and testers working together.

The scrum team works as follows:

1. The team estimates the requirements. A ‘Sprint planning meeting’ is held to plan a ‘Sprint’, i.e., an iteration.
2. During the execution of a sprint, the team conducts a ‘Daily stand-up meeting’ to discuss the project status. The scrum master uses this meeting to find out about issues and resolves them.
3. When the requirements are developed and tested fully, the features should be in a demonstrable state. The team conducts a ‘Sprint review meeting’, where the project stakeholders approve the sprint.
4. After the sprint, the team conducts a ‘Sprint retrospective meeting’, which is a lessons-learned exercise.

Check our guide “How to Build a Scrum Development Team” for more details.

You need to use an appropriate project management tool. Zoho is a good choice. Our Agile PM tools guide provides more examples.

You may want to convert your website into a mobile app in the future. We have a guide that can help you with this. Read “How to convert your website into a mobile app” for more information on this.

How much does it cost to build an esports website?

PaaS providers publish their pricing details on their websites. Some API providers do so, too, whereas you need to contact the providers that don’t.

Your development manpower cost depends on your features and the local labor market. 

Planning to Build an Esports Tournament Website?

Given the lucrative future of the esports industry, today is the right time to start planning your next esports tournament software project. 

As discussed above, to develop a professional esports tournament website with customizable features, you will need excellent coding skills and knowledge of the best software development practices.

If you don’t have these programming skills in your project team, you should get professional help for this end-to-end development project.

Read our guide “How to find the best software development company?” for more information.

If you are still looking for an esports-expert developers community, DevTeam.Space can help. You can partner with our software developers, experienced in all the latest technologies, by giving your initial development requirements via this quick form.

One of our technical managers will get back to you to discuss further details on team building, project planning, implementation, etc.

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