# How do you build a website for an album drop?

Canonical: https://seangarschi.com/answers/how-to-build-an-album-drop-website

Updated 2026-08-19. Category: Interactive builds.

A drop site should do one memorable thing, capture contact details, and survive its traffic spike. Build it static and deploy it to an edge network so there is no origin request on the critical path, decide the single interaction before any design work, and make owned audience capture the primary conversion.

## Build order

The order matters more than the individual decisions, because getting it wrong means discovering the mechanic does not work after the design is approved.

- Decide the one interaction. Write it in a sentence. If it takes a paragraph, it is not ready.
- Prototype it ugly, on a phone, with placeholder assets. Judge the feel before anything is designed.
- Set an asset budget in kilobytes before art direction begins, and hold it.
- Build static. No database in the critical path, no server-side rendering on request.
- Add capture: email or SMS, one field, positioned at the peak of the experience rather than at the end.
- Load test at ten times your expected peak. The announcement is the peak, not the release.

## The mistake almost everyone makes

Treating streaming links as the conversion. Streaming links are why people came. What you gained is the contact list, and that list is the only asset that survives a label change or a platform algorithm shift.

## Related questions

**How long before release should the site be ready?**

Live before the announcement, not before the release. The announcement is when traffic peaks, and it frequently arrives earlier than planned.

**Should the drop site autoplay music?**

For a music release, sound on with an obvious mute is usually correct, the visitor arrived deliberately for audio. Silent-by-default makes sense for a brand campaign, not for a record.

Source: https://seangarschi.com/answers/how-to-build-an-album-drop-website
Contact: start@growthr.com