Managing 500 million pageviews/month without a single downtime
Client is the most prolific web presence of media conglomerate, the most popular News channel in Philippines with over 120-130 million monthly page views. The previous implementation on Drupal CMS was not scalable to manage huge traffic volumes, with upcoming Philippines elections 2016 was expected to result in more traffic, Client needed to move News to more stable and scalable solution.
Client isa major commercial television network, the largest entertainment and media conglomerate in the Philippines. It is one of the core businesses of the Lopez Holdings Corporation, which are headed by an influential Filipino family.
Goals
In order to manage huge traffic volumes, managing web content well, integrate all online marketing campaigns and managing collaboration and communities, client decided to restructure and redesign the existing site along with responsiveness. Ray Business Technologies studied client's requirement and proposed Kentico CMS for the implementation of the site. Kentico Enterprise CMS is a leading provider of Content Management Solution, empowering enterprises to quickly build and deploy Internet Solutions.
While the Immediate Goal was the upcoming elections in 2016 which is expected to increase traffic, there were other important goals of the projects were:
- Performance scalability and development issues on the previous Drupal based platform
- Create a scalable environment to handle up to 500 million page views/month in the next 3 years
- Allow for continuous site/page optimizations so they can continually grow traffic
- Faster development and deployment time for the news team to react to changing business requirements and needs
Challenges
- The main challenge was the site has to be built and delivered under tight timelines
- The migration from Drupal was a difficult task with huge content already aggregated
- Understanding existing IT Infrastructure and devise better IT Infrastructure
- Change in technical approach.
- Data migration
- Azure deployment process
- Custom workflow functionality
Solution
- RBT used Agile methodology and delivered minimum viable product (MVP) initially and added remaining features in the next sprint.
- Efficient use of Redis Cache implementation to serve more users
- Custom tables are used instead of page types and published data is moved from content tree to custom tables.
- Implemented daily delta migration
- Implemented Azure Cloud services
- Implemented Custom workflow for publishing using different user roles
- Implemented Custom module grid to display published items
- Developed Scalable product with flexibility.
Result
The new website has enabled to cater to big traffic volumes during 2016 Philippines election and managed to get up to 99.95% uptime. The new site resulted in traffic soaring almost 33% and driven better user engagement and time spent on the website.
The new website was built on Kentico, provides improved user experience and has served to further strengthening the position of the client as the leader in News.
- The site witnessed the Increase in traffic up to 33%, currently site has over 140-160 million monthly page views
- The site witnessed 242 million Page Views in July 2016, which was managed well without a single downtime.
- Increase in average visit duration and Increase in unique visitors on the website
- The News website rank improved to 6th in Philippines and 388 globally as of September, 2016
- The website’s bounce rates was dropped by 22%
- Improvement in social media engagement
