When one of our clients’ country qualified for the World Cup, we knew their website was about to get slammed. Match days would bring huge traffic spikes, and the current setup wasn’t ready for it.
WP Engine’s initial recommendation was to upgrade from a P3 to a P9 or P10 plan — an extremely expensive move. Instead, we decided to optimize first.
Here’s exactly what we did:
1. Secured the Backend Using reports from WP Engine, we discovered constant brute-force attacks hitting the login page. We immediately hid both the wp-login.php and wp-admin URLs, changing them to custom, secret ones. This simple change instantly reduced malicious traffic.
2. Removed Performance Hogs We temporarily deactivated the Yoast SEO plugin. While great for SEO, it was consuming significant server resources. Since SEO wasn’t a priority during the tournament, this single change gave us a massive boost in performance.
3. Upgraded PHP Version We moved from PHP 7.3 to PHP 8.4. The newer version delivered much faster execution times and better overall efficiency.
4. Cleaned House We cleared out bloated logs and unnecessary stored assets that were taking up space and slowing things down.
5. Fixed Slow Database Queries Using performance reports, we identified and optimized the heaviest database queries that were dragging down response times.
6. Smarter Caching Rules We discovered some high-traffic pages — especially those shared heavily on social media — weren’t being cached at all. We updated the cache rules so these popular pages would be properly served from cache, dramatically reducing server load.
7. Added Enterprise Security & Speed We enabled WP Engine’s Cloudflare integration (GES). This gave us Cloudflare’s CDN for faster global loading, plus strong protection against DDoS attacks.
The Result The website stayed fast and stable throughout the tournament. We successfully handled major traffic spikes without having to upgrade to a much more expensive server plan.
This project proved something important: before throwing money at bigger servers, it’s usually worth taking a hard look at your current setup first.
