Industry: Travel, Media
Site: https://boardingarea.com/
Challenge: Boost performance for a highly popular (and highly trafficked) network of travel websites.
Solution: WP Engine's managed hosting for WordPress® with compute-optimized C2 server hardware from Google Cloud.
Results: A more than 40% decrease in server execution time across all web properties.
BoardingArea is a network of popular business travel and frequent flyer websites producing content sought by millions of global readers every day.
Founded more than 25 years ago, BoardingArea’s websites have provided news, information, and advice for every type of traveler. The publication’s goal is to provide frequent travelers with the information they need to make the most of every trip.
"Once we switched over to the new hardware, which was quick and seamless, we actually saw an almost 70% increase in site performance. We were blown away."
— Denny Butts, Director of Project Engagement, BoardingArea
A network of high-traffic WordPress sites.
If you’ve ever searched for travel advice or information ahead of, during, or after a trip, there’s a good chance you read an article through BoardingArea.com: a network of some of the most popular travel blogs on the web.
Each site included in the BoardingArea network is hand-selected for its quality of content, timeliness, and entertainment value, which has created a highly curated experience for many readers.
So many, in fact, that sites across BoardingArea’s network see more than 200 million unique visitors annually. From sites like Monkey Miles, which offers tips for travelers looking to maximize their points, awards, miles, or vouchers, to others like One Mile at a Time, which provides a more serious look at travel news, tips, and deals, the wide variety of content on BoardingArea makes it one of the most popular travel content hubs on the web. Most sites in BoardingArea's network continue to see consistent, year-over-year growth in readership.
Contributing sites have long been built on WordPress®, and BoardingArea migrated its entire network of WordPress blogs to WP Engine in 2015. The move was due in large part to an increase in traffic across BoardingArea’s sites, as WP Engine has a track record of helping high-traffic sites manage performance factors like availability and uptime. The migration also aimed to offload the backend management of all BoardingArea’s WordPress sites to a single trusted partner.
“Before we made the move, we were looking for two things: a host that could manage our heavy traffic load, and one with WordPress expertise,” said Denny Butts, BoardingArea’s Director of Project Engagement.
“As soon as we migrated over, we knew we had found both in WP Engine.”
Adding next-gen speed to the equation.
Since migrating to WP Engine’s platform in 2015, Butts said, life is good.
“We’ve been fans of WP Engine since we came on board. For a while, it was all systems go—things worked, and when we came across inevitable issues, there was immediate support from the WP Engine side to help us figure them out.”
Post-migration, BoardingArea’s sites continued to grow. New hosting infrastructure armed BoardingArea's site with the ability to deliver fast-loading, responsive content to readers while offering the BoardingArea team seamless admin control across all of the different sites on their network.
“Our sites were doing great,” Butts said, “and then the migration to next-gen hardware happened.”
Because BoardingArea was using a dedicated server, they were moved, at no extra cost, to Google Cloud compute-optimized hardware in 2019, which immediately created massive performance improvements for their already high-performing sites.
“Our account team at WP Engine briefed us on the new hardware and told us we’d see up to a 40% increase in performance by making the switch,” Butts said.
“We were excited by the possibility and agreed to go ahead, but we had no idea how drastic the change would be.”
“Once we switched over to the new hardware, which was quick and seamless, we actually saw an almost 70% increase in site performance. We were blown away.”
The Results
In addition to the immediate improvements in speed and overall performance BoardingArea saw across its sites, Butts said he and his team felt like they had future-proofed their digital presence thanks to cutting-edge infrastructure that can keep site operations running faster than ever.
“It gave us a solid foundation to keep building our business, and since the switch was made, we’ve been able to do just that,” said Butts.
Overall, the results BoardingArea has achieved are in line with the improvements Google envisioned for high-traffic, media-heavy sites on its compute-optimized cloud infrastructure.
“Our next-gen cloud virtual machines are designed to help traffic-heavy sites like BoardingArea serve requests faster and create a smooth loading experience for site visitors,” said Hanan Youssef, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform.
Since moving over to the C2 hardware, BoardingArea has experienced ongoing performance benefits and additional readership growth. Even during the massive downturn in global travel in 2020, their sites continued to report increased traffic.
“In some cases, we’ve seen page views increase by as much 30% year-over-year, and a big part of that is because those pages are being served to the reader faster,” Butts said.
Working remotely was another shift brought on by the pandemic that the BoardingArea team has had to accommodate—and it's one which WP Engine helped make more manageable.
“Working remotely is seamless with WP Engine," said Butts.
"My team has quick, easy access to a network that’s always up, and they can do what they need to do—redesign sites, optimize SEO, etc.—knowing they have easy access to WP Engine support when they need it.”
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