Web Hosting for Local Theatres and Arts Venues

Short answer: a theatre website is a box office with a building attached, and the most important hosting decision is that the box office should not be on your hosting at all. Use a dedicated ticketing system, keep the site to the programme, and page caching will handle the on-sale rush comfortably.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our web hosting plans start at £39 a year, and if you are a registered charity, as many venues are, our charity plans are cheaper still.

Do not run ticketing on your web hosting

This is worth more than everything else here. Ticketing involves seat maps, holds, concessions, memberships, refunds, card payments and reporting, plus a peak of concentrated traffic the moment a popular show opens booking.

A ticketing plugin inside WordPress on shared hosting is where that fails, and it fails on the one occasion that matters most. Two hundred people trying to book the same eighty seats at ten in the morning is a contention problem a plugin on a small plan is not built for.

Use a dedicated box office system. Several are built specifically for small and mid-scale UK venues, and they handle the seat map, the payment compliance and the peak load. Your website presents the programme and hands off cleanly.

Then the on-sale rush is easy

With ticketing external, the surge hits your what’s on page rather than a checkout, and everyone is requesting the same page. That is the ideal case for page caching.

Have page caching and a CDN configured before a season launch rather than discovering your limits during one. Exclude anything showing live availability from the cache, or you will display yesterday’s remaining seats. Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers how speed is measured.

Production photography is your storage question

Every production generates a set of images, and you should keep the archive rather than deleting past shows, since it matters to your community and attracts search traffic on performer and production names.

• Resize before uploading. Production photography arrives at full resolution and is often eight megabytes a frame
• Use lazy loading, so a production page does not load thirty images at once
• Serve through a CDN
• Check your storage allowance and how it scales, since this grows every season and WordPress creates several resized copies of each upload

Check your photography licences too. Production images usually carry credit requirements and sometimes time limits.

Video belongs on a platform

Trailers and archive footage should not sit on your web server. Shared hosting is not built to stream, and a trailer that buffers on the morning a show is being promoted is worse than no trailer. Use a video platform and embed.

Your technical spec is one of your most requested files

Hirers, visiting companies and touring productions all want the tech spec, and it is frequently a large PDF nobody can open on a phone.

Keep it under a megabyte or two by generating it from a document rather than scanning, and make it easy to find rather than buried under a hire page. Delete superseded versions rather than uploading new ones alongside, since old files stay at their URL and a company working from last year’s rig plot is a problem.

Access information should be text, not a PDF

Access questions determine whether someone can attend at all, and putting the answers in a downloadable document makes them harder to find and unreadable by a screen reader.

Publish as a web page: step-free routes, wheelchair spaces and how to book them, hearing loop coverage, captioned and relaxed performance dates, accessible toilets, parking. A venue that programmes relaxed performances and has an inaccessible website is an awkward contradiction.

Forms and email

Hire enquiries and access bookings arrive by form, and forms fail invisibly. Send form mail through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail, add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, and deliver to shared monitored addresses rather than one person’s inbox.

Our guide to contact forms not sending emails covers the causes, and our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes, so box office, hires, technical and marketing can each have one. Access bookings in particular should have a phone number as well as a form.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting with good caching, a CDN and generous storage, with ticketing and video external. Free SSL, daily backups, unlimited mailboxes.

Move up a tier if you run a large archive or anything membership-based. Budgets are often tied to funding cycles, so check the renewal figure rather than the introductory rate; our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be standard.

Frequently asked questions

Can we run ticketing on our own website?

You should not. Use a dedicated box office system. A plugin on shared hosting fails during the on-sale rush, which is the moment that matters most.

Will our site cope with a season launch?

With ticketing external and page caching in place, yes. Exclude live availability displays from the cache.

How much storage does a production archive need?

More than you expect, and it grows every season. Resize before uploading and check how your allowance scales.

Should access information be a downloadable PDF?

No. Publish it as a web page so it is findable and readable by a screen reader.

Explore more

Our guide to festivals and community events covers the related one-off event traffic case, and for requirements shared with other community organisations see our guide to clubs and community groups.

Our hosting plans start at £39 a year, with a free trial if you want to test performance first.