Situation

Nation Cymru, a prominent national news outlet, was experiencing massive growth, with monthly traffic escalating from tens of thousands to over 2 million hits. The existing website, built on an off-the-shelf WordPress template, lacked the performance infrastructure and bespoke design needed to support this scale and effectively present a diverse range of content categories.

Task

Our team was tasked with overhauling the website’s architecture, design, and hosting to ensure it could reliably handle the surging traffic while providing a custom, high-performance platform with dedicated areas for content categories like Sport, Feature, Opinion, and Culture.

Action

• Redesigned and rebuilt the website, moving from a standard template to a custom-designed platform that featured dedicated presentation areas for key news categories.
• Managed the hosting environment, scaling it up to maintain near-perfect uptime as monthly traffic exceeded the 2 million-hit mark.
• Implemented critical performance optimisations within the WordPress environment, specifically refining database queries and leveraging native caching mechanisms.
• Integrated Cloudflare caching and Content Delivery Network (CDN) services to globally distribute content and absorb traffic spikes.
• Re-architected the hosting setup by separating the web application and the database onto distinct, dedicated servers to ensure independent scaling and resilience under heavy load.

Result

Delivered a robust, high-performance website capable of reliably serving over 2 million monthly hits with minimal downtime. The architectural and caching optimisations significantly improved load times and user experience. The bespoke design successfully showcased diverse content (Sport, Feature, Opinion, Culture), providing Nation Cymru with a modern, scalable platform aligned with its status as a leading national news source.

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