For 100+ years, the NFL has been an institution, and NFL.com is its front porch. By 2025, that porch was cracking with slow pages and buried information. Every Sunday, 20M+ fans arrived for a score or schedule, then bounced to YouTube, Reddit, Bleacher Report or pirated streams to answer the only question that mattered: “How do I watch my team right now?”
Fans weren’t leaving football — they were losing trust in the NFL’s own home.
At the same time, the league shifted to a direct-to-consumer future. NFL+, the league’s proprietary streaming platform, is the engine of that shift, but the website wasn’t built to explain NFL+ or convert viewers to it.
The objective: Leverage the NFL's massive web presence and give it a strategy to power the next generation of global fandom and business growth.
After reimagining the NFL app just one year ago, the NFL uncovered key insights about how web fandom differentiated from app fandom. Apps are loyalty-driven and seasonal; the web is utility-driven, year-round and moment-based.
The breakthrough insight: fans on the web don’t browse; they decide. Every visit to NFL.com is a question: What’s happening? What matters? How do I watch?
With that revitalized playbook, the NFL transformed its digital flagship into a real-time decision engine in just one season.
What was once a static information hub is today a smarter, faster companion that meets fans in the moment and guides them to what matters most.
At the center of the experience is Ways to Watch, an all-new universal utility that considers game time, location, broadcast rights, team affinity and subscription status to tell fans exactly how to watch any game, instantly. No guessing, hunting or bouncing.
The NFL also invested in building a fully reimagined design system and adaptive component library into the core of the website, which, while invisible to fans, is the foundation powering how NFL.com delivers exactly what fans need — from NFL+ to schedules, scores, previews, recaps, and team pages. One system now seamlessly adapts to and showcases 32 teams over 272 games and 1,200+ players — all year long.
Perhaps most important of all, the reinvented experience is faster, redesigned for high-intent moments (scores, schedules, standings, highlights) and replatformed to a headless architecture. The NFL replaced clutter with clarity, static templates with responsive logic and friction with flow.
NFL.com now actively guides fandom, turning intent into action.
The NFL.com transformation delivered immediate, sustained impact across engagement, discoverability and subscription growth. It's proof that strategic, customer experience investments benefit fans as much as they benefit the business.
Engagement
Discovery & Navigation
NFL+ Growth
Performance & SEO
NFL.com is now the connective tissue between fandom and commerce, reinvigorating the league’s trust with its 150 million web visitors.
