New York University | Enterprise WordPress

CLIENT SINCE 2014

Founded in 1831, NYU is considered one of the world’s most influential research universities. Among its faculty and alumni are 37 Nobel Laureates, over 30 Pulitzer Prize winners, over 30 Academy Award winners, and hundreds of members of the National Academies of Sciences.

Key Metrics

Optimization

Reduced overall page load time by 50%
100% Network Uptime

Result

Upon completing three initial optimization phases, FlowPress and NYU together were able to cut load times in half across the network. NYU already had a high end hosting platform in place but the below optimizations allowed them to realize all of the benefits of such a platform. Other key highlights include 100% network uptime and a reduction of network weight of 50%.

“I can always turn to FlowPress for technical advice and guidance. They are quick communicators that are always on hand to lend us their expertise.”

Richard Malenitza Assistant Director, Teaching & Learning with Technology, New York University

Challenge

When New York University approached FlowPress, their multisite at wp.nyu.edu (a 4,000+ site multisite), was experiencing regular downtime and errors.

NYU challenged FlowPress to audit this massive multisite to discover what the issues were and then fix them in quick order.

The results of our audit showed several issues leading to performance issues.

A combination of poorly optimized themes and plugins (spread randomly across the network), as well as a dated database had resulted in a bloated installation that struggles to stay online and performs well below user expectations.

Solution

Phase One: Plugin and Theme Optimizations

Due to the size and complexity of the multisite network, Flowpress recommended an immediate cleanup of plugins and themes. Flowpress also audited the network impact involved with switching active plugins and themes, while also creating a plan for transitioning content and updating users on the new plugins/themes.

Phase Two: Database Optimizations

Due to the usage of inefficient plugins/themes, the database was suffering from poor performance and long query times. Flowpress cleaned up and optimized the database. This eliminated the bottlenecks and downtime.

Updates Performed:

Ran Network Upgrades to remedy errors and reduce query times
Flushed corrupted data, transients, comment-meta, post revisions and other old database data
Removed database tables left behind by old plugins and themes
Optimized the database Cached expensive, yet crucial queries

Phase Three: Network Management and Multisite Assessment

Once Phase One and Two were completed, further network optimizations as well as a detailed action plan was created for NYU.

Work with us

If you like what you see, get in touch to find out how we could help your current website system perform much, much better today and for tomorrow.

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Ongoing Projects

Throughout the project, FlowPress provided an array of services including:

Removal of unnecessary files
Removal of unused plugins and themes
Disabled and replaced plugins and themes causing bottlenecks and errors
Streamlined large amount of external http requests
Optimized images network-wide to reduce total bandwidth and ease server load
Setup 24/7 monitoring and reporting
Setup New Relic browser monitoring
Creation of custom unit tests to ensure code is compliant

FlowPress has an enduring, long-term relationship with NYU that provides mission critical access to their website services for hundreds of thousands of users every day.