Objective

With the onset of Covid-19 and stay-at-home orders unfolding across the U.S., businesses and organizations of all sizes quickly began searching for creative solutions that would allow them to continue operating at a time of incredible uncertainty. While challenges were widespread, especially during the chaotic first days and weeks of the pandemic, religious institutions, which traditionally rely on a physical location as a place of worship, were hit particularly hard.

With everything unfolding right before Palm Sunday and Easter, churches around the U.S. faced pressing decisions as to how they would approach the holidays, and how their parishioners would observe them. It was against this backdrop that Corkboard Concepts was tapped by a local diocese for help reimagining their online live broadcasts.

The diocese’s overarching goal was to ensure that anyone who wanted to attend an online church service could—and that an influx of visitors wouldn’t crash their site. Diocese staff had already produced a live broadcast using their existing website and hosting provider, which had proven unsuccessful. Nearly 40% of viewers who tried to join the service were unable to access it due to the high number of concurrent users that had overloaded the site’s server resources.

The team at Corkboard was brought in to overhaul the process, find a new solution that could supply the needed uptime, and do it all within a seven-day timeframe, before the next Sunday mass. It wouldn’t be solved with a simple migration, either—the diocese legacy site had been built using SharePoint, and it had accumulated pages, content, and data spanning nearly two decades. The legacy site was simply too large and cumbersome to pick up and move to a new server within the allotted time frame. With the clock ticking, finding a solution that could support a high number of concurrent users took center stage. While the rest of the site could be managed later on, the Corkboard team focused on finding a new hosting provider and building a separate digital property, where the live broadcasts could be easily accessed.

The Results

With only a couple of days to spare, the Corkboard team began final preparations for what would essentially be a hand-off of traffic from the legacy site to the newly-built experience.

In order to do this, we established two instances of the website, creating a ww. for the traditional website experience which was maintained by the internal diocese IT team, and a www. that would be directed to our new site on WP Engine to handle the traffic.

The switch was made in record time. Once the new site was live, the Corkboard team, with help from their dedicated team at WP Engine, also built out a full redirect list to seamlessly pass off organic, cached, and historic data, which took users from the www. pages that were not hosted on the new experience to the ww. From there, it was off to the races. The upcoming Sunday mass came and went without issue, and since then, the new site hasn’t dropped a single visitor request.

Server logs for the new site were healthy, not only during the Sunday masses throughout Lent but also for the entire Easter week and Easter mass, which ended up being the diocese’s largest and most attended live broadcast of the year.

The new, WP Engine-hosted solution also increased the overall user experience by vastly improving load times, and it’s set the diocese up for future success. The transition from an in-location only service to a digital-inclusion approach is one the diocese plans on keeping in place going forward.

The quick response by Corkboard Concepts and WP Engine helped that transition go smoothly, and provided a scalable plan for the future.