Rumours of a football club manager's possible resignation sent record traffic to a south-coast daily's website.

Ian Holloway, manager of Plymouth Argyle, quit his post on Wednesday following three days of frenetic speculation that he was moving to Leicester City FC.

As the rumour mill span out of control, The Herald's digital arm – thisisplymouth.co.uk – saw record visitors as fans clamoured for the latest news and to post comments.

Web editor Neil Shaw claimed the site was the first to break the story at lunchtime on Wednesday that Holloway had finally left the club.

It was read more than 13,500 times in 12 hours – ten times more hits than the average front page story would receive.

Neil said: "The reaction to the story has been phenomenal.

"Argyle fans and Herald readers have been flooding to our site time and again for the last four days to pick up every piece of breaking news.

"The Herald's sports team was ahead of the game from the start and broke the news online before anyone else.

"Fans appreciated that and kept coming back for more.

"As soon as we had the news we sent out an e-mail alert to our registered users – we have more than 23,000 now – and posted links to the stories on Argyle and Leicester City fan sites."

Between the first rumours at 4pm on Monday and the printing of the final confirmation in The Herald yesterday morning, the various stories were read about 53,000 times online.

Readers posted thousands of comments with one story alone receiving 500 remarks.

When the resignation was officially confirmed by the club at 1.45pm on Wednesday, The Herald rushed out a special edition with a new front and back page.

It included instant fan reaction and expert analysis with between 2,000 and 3,000 copies hitting the streets before the evening rush hour.

In yesterday's Herald there were 10 pages of news, reaction and analysis including a whole page of fans' comments posted on the site.

Neil added: "Everyone worked hard to ensure we were first with the news online and in print, with a fantastic effort going in to get the special edition out and to bring 10 pages of news, reaction, comment and analysis together in a matter of hours for Thursday's Herald.

"The success of a story like this shows that, whatever the medium, content is king.

"Success online is all about good old fashioned journalism, at least as much as it is about new technology."

Herald web journalist Jon Bayley said that on a normal day the site would receive around 18,000 hits but he predicted the final figure could be up to 35,000 for yesterday.

He added: "We're expecting another record day with all our follow up stories about Plymouth Argyle and we've been talking to Leicester City too.

"Ian Holloway has been on Sky News apologising to the fans and the story has actually sent many people to the site who would not normally come to it.

"We're expecting it to be busy throughout the rest of the week and over the weekend and we have an online forum so that readers can vote for who they want as the next manager."