Diocese of Greensburg
Website Development | Hosting
Industry: Religious Organization, Digital Agency
Challenge: Quickly build and launch a website that could sustain high concurrent traffic and allow for church services to be help online, seamlessly.
Solution: WordPress-built website launched on WP Engine’s Premium Platform, equipped with dedicated architecture and real-time traffic monitoring.
Results: A rapidly-deployed digital experience that looks better, loads faster, and hasn’t dropped a single visitor request.
Diocese of Greensburg
Highlights
7Day
timeframe
40k
concurrent visitors
0%
downtime
90%
pagescore speed
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.
Our approach
The hosting part of the equation immediately presented its own challenges. While ~40,000 concurrent visitors had reached the site during the initial live broadcast, that number didn’t include all the visitors who tried to access the site but were unable to do so.
At this point, the Corkboard team began working with their counterparts at WP Engine to provision a dedicated server that could handle a high number of concurrent requests, specifically for the live broadcasts. The Corkboard team also set up live monitoring for high-traffic events, which provides regular logs of bandwidth, resource usage, and website hits in real-time from a dedicated team at WP Engine.
With the new server in place, and knowing that every page EXCEPT the home page and live broadcast page on the SharePoint site wathe Corkboard team went to work, building a default site experience on WordPress where the live broadcasts would live.s not experiencing an overload of traffic, Once the initial set-up was completed, a splash page was created to serve as an impact shield for the traditional website, and it directed visitors to either the legacy site or the live broadcast feed that was set up on the newly-provisioned WP Engine server.
After this had culminated in a functional development site, the Corkboard and WP Engine teams began running it through stringent load testing, sending millions of requests to the site over a period of days to make sure it wouldn’t break.
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.