The Sport Review – Scaling for Thousands of Concurrent Connections

By migrating to Kinsta The Sport Review saw a 50% increase in speed and a platform easily capable of handling thousands of concurrent connections.

The Sport Review

The Sport Review is a British sports news website, delivering a mix of breaking news, social content and original reporting. It was founded by Martin Caparrotta and Kieran Beckles back in 2008 and now receives on average 2 million visitors a month.

They came to Kinsta after realizing it was time to move to a more professional platform, and were needing a provider with a focus on speed and reliability. They were intrigued by our hosting solution which is powered by Google Cloud Platform. Their old host was an unmanaged service and not specific to WordPress, which resulted in support and optimization not tailored to the platform.

Heavy Mobile Traffic

Moving a site with more than 65,000 posts and countless images could have presented any number of issues, but Kinsta had it moved within a couple of hours. They recently hit a record traffic day with 470,000 pageviews and 260,000 unique users. 80% of the traffic to thesportreview.com is from mobile, which is why decreasing page load speeds were so important for them, and one of the main reason’s they decided upon Kinsta.

@TheSportReview's new @Googlecloud based @kinsta environment handled the post-match @ManUtd v @ChelseaFC traffic spike in style 👌⚽ pic.twitter.com/kJewykSqaV

— Martin Caparrotta (@MartinCap) April 16, 2017

Optimizing The Sport Review

After migrating to Kinsta they saw that our platform was easily able to handle thousands of concurrent connections, while still decreasing page load times. However, we took this a step further and made database and server-level optimizations to increase the speed of their WordPress site. This included converting their database from MyISAM to InnoDB which supports row-level locking, moving them from their previous PHP 5.6 engine to PHP 7, and fine-tuning the caching to ensure the site served mobile visitors in the most optimal way.

It’s fair to say that the speed of everything pretty much doubled after the migration, from loading and publishing posts, to all front-end requests. Brilliant support, blazing fast set-up.

Martin Caparrotta
thesportreview.com