Ten million sports fans and counting visit EssentiallySports.com to get up-to-date news about their favorite associations like the NBA, NASCAR, WWE, and more. As the popularity of the multi-sport site grew, the EssentiallySports team knew their Wordpress instance couldn’t scale to support 25 million pageviews each month. Page speed was a constant focus of improvement, but with rapid growth, developers didn’t have time for a rebuild. Google’s Core Update was looming, and EssentiallySports needed a new solution to improve page speed and eliminate downtime.
With an easy setup and build process, Vercel was the only tool that could offer EssentiallySports what it needed in a development and deployment platform. It took less than 20 minutes for the team to start using Vercel for the first time, and the full migration was done in under three months. Developer productivity has improved with Vercel’s superior staging environment and easy process for pushing to production—saving time for the lean team.
“Vercel is a must-have for anyone who's trying to build websites for scale.” —Suryansh Tibarewal, Founder, EssentiallySports
EssentiallySports uses headless WordPress with Next.js and Vercel to decouple their frontend from their existing data. By using a headless CMS with Vercel, they were able to modernize their frontend and 3x their site speed experience score. Their application uses server-rendering to fetch the latest articles on every request, in combination with stale-while-revalidate caching headers, to decrease load on WordPress and ensure top performance.
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