Context
A major US print & digital media company
The client is a leader in celebrity, health, and fitness media brands, with over 70 million unique visitors and 0.76 billion page views monthly. The client wanted to downsize their website maintenance costs, improve ad revenue, and offer a premium user experience to their vast number of online readers.
Business problem
Being ultra-competitive, the media and content industry needs content providers to offer fast and simple website experiences to attract and retain visitors and subscribers. The client faced issues with page load times that were leading to a decline in subscription conversions and overall customer satisfaction. Further, hosting costs were high and profit realization from their numerous sites was dropping.
Expected goals
Key goals expected included:
Reduced cloud hosting costs
Improves website performance in terms of page load time and UX to handle frequent bursts and spikes in visitor traffic
Enhanced opportunities for improving ad revenue - more and more desirable ad units on various pages
Stay ahead of the competition with an always-available digital presence
Solution
Vastly improved, intelligently scalable cloud hosting
Migrated 15+ sites to a single cloud hosting platform from three legacy hosting platforms, without compromising content and data, by leveraging multiple out-of-the-box technologies
The sites' front- and back-ends were optimized to improve UX without losing scalability
Restructuring and maintaining core functionalities with the latest tech to meet stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) consistently
Customized AWS solutions - AutoScaling, Elastic Load Balancers, containerization - were utilized to make the hosting architecture lightweight, responsive, and sensitive to changes in traffic demand
The new solution offered the client enhanced site UX with faster page loads and 99.99% uptime.
Cloud hosting: HeartyHosting integrated with AWS
Customized and optimized hosting solutions such as AutoScaling, Elastic Load Balancers, and containerization
CMS: WordPress integrated with an array of adtech
Outcomes of the Engagement
Faster site performance - even with major traffic spikes
Better cost control and improved uptime
The client saved an average of 27% on hosting costs for each of it 15+ sites. The new hosting configuration achieved 99.99% uptime with lower costs and faster access to content.
Faster website loading and increase in traffic
Page load times had a 1.2s improvement over the previous hosting configuration. Further, sites retained their visitors for longer periods, logging 35% more page views per session.
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Key project outcome metrics:
Reduction in hosting costs
Uptime across 15+ sites
Drop in average page load time
Increase in page views per user session