Best Practices for Event Websites in 2025: A Guide for Preventing Ticket Sales Failures in Canada
Use this seven-step pre-event website checklist to prevent ticket sales crashes in 2025. Created for event planners in Calgary and other Canadian cities.
Updated: September 2025
Overview
Imagine that your conference, festival, or concert is about to start. Your website crashes as thousands of excited attendees rush to purchase tickets: lost sales, disappointed fans, and a bad rep. In 2025, this is a real risk, not just a nightmare.
The stability of your website is very important, whether you're hosting a big Canadian music festival or a small community event in Calgary. We helped our clients in a variety of industries, from construction to mortgage platforms and event management platforms, in developing dependable digital solutions capable of handling significant traffic spikes.
In this blog post, I will discuss the seven-step checklist to maintain the functionality of your ticket sales website.
Step 1: Stress Test Your Website Before the Big Day
Your event site should be able to handle 2x of your anticipated traffic. Large-scale events like the Calgary Stampede receive hundreds of thousands of hits in Canada. This demand is simulated in a stress test, which identifies weak points before the actual rush.
✅ Tip: You can use tools to test traffic spikes.
Step 2: Optimize Your Hosting & Servers
For big events, shared hosting is insufficient. Mostly Canadians go with cloud hosting (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure). Today, almost 90% businesses use cloud services, so make a smart choice and create your website scalable enough to handle traffic.
Step 3: Secure Payment Gateways
You need to integrate fast and secure checkout systems. Integrated payment systems, such as PayPal Canada, Stripe, or Moneris, build trust and decrease downtime.
*Make sure that SSL certificates are always enabled and PCI DSS compliance is maintained.
Step 4: Mobile Optimization Is Non-Negotiable
In Canada, 73% of ticket purchases are made via mobile devices, per Statista 2025. A slow mobile website can lead to loss of sales.
Check the responsiveness of your website on iOS and Android.
Step 5: Real-Time Monitoring Tools
Don’t wait for a crash alert due to heavy traffic or frustrated users. If load times exceed three seconds, optimize right away.
Step 6: Backup & Recovery Plan
There is still a chance of crashes. Having recovery methods and daily backups guarantees that your website can be restored in a matter of minutes.
Fact: Compared to those without a disaster recovery strategy, Canadian event organizations with one experienced 60% less downtime in 2025.
Step 7: Integrate Admin Dashboards for Full Control
Ticketing dashboards should be accessible to administrators so they can keep an eye on user activity, sales, and possible mistakes. To help firms maintain control, we have developed specialized dashboards and portals for sectors like mortgages and construction. This also holds true for event tickets.
Testimonial
We sold 15,000 tickets without a single crash by following this checklist before our music event in Calgary —our best investment. The coordinator of the event shared this with us.
FAQs
Why do websites that sell tickets crash?
Websites that sell tickets frequently crash due to weak hosting infrastructure, unexpected spikes in traffic, or untested integrations like payment gateways. If demand increases unexpectedly, even a tiny local event can overload a poorly optimized site.
How can I tell when the website for my event is ready?
Doing a load/stress test, making sure your payment systems are PCI-compliant, and verifying that your hosting package permits scalability are the best ways to verify readiness. You're doing well if your website can manage twice as much traffic as you anticipated.
Do I also require a mobile app?
An app isn't necessary for every event, but if you anticipate more than 20,000 people or want to increase engagement (think digital ticket scanning or push notifications), it's worth the money. Using mobile-first solutions has increased engagement at certain Canadian events by 30%.
Can little community events in Calgary also have crashes?
Yes. Smaller organizers frequently believe that problems only arise at major festivals; however, if 500+ people click "buy now" at once, even small concerts or community fundraisers may fail. While there is less risk, it is always preferable to be prepared than to fix downtime during sales.
About the Author
Written by Amna Abid , Lead Platform Architect at Fantech Labs
As the lead platform architect at Fantech Labs, Amna Abid specializes in building scalable and secure websites capable of handling high-traffic ticket sales for events across Canada. She focuses on stress-testing, cloud infrastructure, and payment gateway integration to ensure that event organizers in Calgary and beyond can launch their ticket sales with confidence, preventing crashes and protecting revenue.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
