Battlefield Fight League
A faster, easier-to-manage website for a growing fight league.
We rebuilt BFL's WordPress site around two people who use it every day: the fans looking for fights, athletes, and results — and the team responsible for keeping everything up to date.
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How it started
We first met the BFL team through a local WordPress community meetup. The countdown to the next event had stopped working. We built a focused plugin that showed the next fight and linked out to the ticket site — and that small fix made a larger problem visible.
What we found
Battlefield Fight League is a British Columbia MMA promotion with years of events, athlete records, rankings, news, and fight history. By late 2024 the site had a heavy theme, overlapping plugins, inconsistent content, slow administration, and a weak mobile experience. Some admin screens could take minutes to load. Rather than keep patching, we rebuilt the WordPress setup around fans checking fights and the team keeping everything up to date.
Keep WordPress. Remove the weight around it.
WordPress itself wasn't the problem. The problem was everything that had accumulated around it. We replaced the theme with a custom-built one, reduced general-purpose plugins, and built focused plugins only where BFL needed specialized jobs — including the next-event countdown with a link to the external ticket site.
Editors kept the familiar WordPress environment. The public site and admin both sat on a lighter foundation, and tasks that had been slowed by extremely long load times became practical again. We treated the admin experience as part of the product, so routine updates would not recreate the same mess.
Turn scattered fight data into connected information.
Years of events and athlete information had accumulated without a consistent structure. We introduced custom database tables, managed through purpose-built WordPress functionality, and connected athletes, fights, and events instead of treating them as isolated pages.
An athlete on a fight card can lead into that athlete's profile and related information. Existing data was cleaned and migrated rather than asking BFL to start over. The ranking system already worked; we improved record management around it and made browsing clearer, especially on mobile.
Make the next event — and the archive — easy to use.
Editorial sections had started to overlap. We separated clearer content types, standardized titles and taxonomy, and migrated the archive. For larger lists, content loads as people browse instead of requesting everything at once.
The public site was rebuilt for phones rather than compressed from desktop. Upcoming events stay visible with a countdown and a clear link to the ticket site, and layouts for fight information, rankings, news, and athlete cards were reconsidered for smaller screens.
Give fighters a recognizable place in the brand.
Portraits use BFL's red visual identity so fighter cards combine photography, name, and weight class in a consistent way. Browsable layouts keep larger groups of athletes easy to explore on desktop and mobile.
Added after launch, as the organization needed it.
After launch, BFL asked for a dedicated sponsorship destination. We added a page that explains partnership opportunities and a simple way to update logos and details as partners change.
- Custom WordPress theme and plugins
- Custom database tables for structured fight data
- Next-event countdown with ticket site links
- Athlete, event, and fight relationships
- Existing content and data migration
- News, archive, and taxonomy cleanup
- Mobile-friendly rankings and responsive UI
- Sponsorship page and sponsor management
Less friction, on both sides of the website.
- Admin that could take minutesReturned to usable working speeds, so fight-week updates were practical again.
- Connected recordsAthletes, events, and fights were structured and related instead of living as isolated pages.
Fans have a clearer path through upcoming events, athletes, rankings, results, and news. The BFL team has a more focused WordPress setup for information that changes from event to event, without the plugin-heavy structure they had been working around.
"Whitespace Studio did an incredible job redesigning my website. Their attention to detail and willingness to accommodate all my requests exceeded my expectations. The new website has already made a big difference in how I connect with my audience!"
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