TheWrap.com is the world’s leading industry news site! With stories about about media and entertainment, TheWrap is dedicated to breaking the biggest news stories in the industry through investigative reporting, expert analysis, and exhaustive research. TheWrap is the only independently owned authoritative industry news site on the internet. With millions of viewers each year, this powerhouse is practically a household name.
Chris joined this project because their site was extremely slow. Using all of his skills, and even learning a few new ones along the way, Chris was able to drop their page load speed from 45 seconds to below 2 seconds. This feat landed a multiyear contract for a site redesign, SEO campaign, newsletter overhaul, a complete rethink of ALL admin tools (because of their extremely high story volume), and any number of other incredible improvements for not only the site users, but also the site admins.
On this project, Chris implemented a completely proprietary framework for selective caching for this industry news blog. This breakthrough lead to massive improvements of speed for logged in users. Chris also analyzed the AWS spend for this account and identified a cost savings of over 50%. Chris implemented user friendly tools for managing the composition of the home page and feed pages. He also implemented a completely new SEO schema that lifted many rankings to page 1. With a DR/DA/AR of over 70, this is one of the highest authority websites on the internet, all because of contributions from Chris.
Highlights from Services Provided for TheWrap Industry News
Development & Implementation
- Unparalleled speed improvements on frontend and backend
- New site design
- Innovative selective caching mechanisms
- Standardized image quality and presentation
- Homepage customization by staff and personalization by users
- Specialty sliders for complex business logic needs
- Advertising integrations and restructurings
- many, many more features
Maintenance
- Daily updates and improvements
- Iterative improvements on site speed
- 1-minute granularity backups and recoveries
- Hosting setup and management
- Third-party service replacements and improvements
Security
- Comprehensive WordPress security analysis & report
- Server & Services setup and routine auditing
- Autoscaling implementation, management, and monitoring
- Password policy creation & enforcement
- Firewall level client blocking
- Round the clock security monitoring
Custom Themes & Plugins
- Completely custom, high-availability tuned theme
- Admin improvements for staff efficiency
- Innovative caching plugin
- Custom Security plugin that helped prevent multiple hack attempts
- Multiple image presentation improvements
- Site organization and optimization plugins
- Admin tooling for managing site content and homepage composition
Hosting Setup
- Evaluation of hosting costs
- Migration of hosting providers
- AWS account setup and management
- Configuration of N+2 AWS Auto-Scaling & EC2
- Integration of CloudFlare & interaction with CloudFlare API