Scaling Up Sneaker News’s Capabilities to Cater to 5.6M Monthly Visitors

Introduction

Sneaker News is the global authority in sneakers. It provides reliable information and news on the most coveted footwear from popular brands like Adidas, Nike, Puma, and others, as well as groundbreaking industry developments. Sneaker News caters to a monthly audience of over 6 million unique readers across 35 million pageviews. Its combined social following is over 11 million people globally. 

As Sneaker News’ business grew, the team found managing over 80,000 pieces of content increasingly challenging. 

Multidots was tasked with finding an easier way of managing the content and aligning content management with the necessary marketing strategies and business logic to engage the readers effectively.

Built two advanced, WordPress-based CMS websites – sneakernews.com and jordansdaily.comSet up a central backend system using the Push and Pull API System on a Core PHP frameworkIntegrated both properties with eBay’s APIs, enabling the company to grow its affiliate revenue

The Story of Sneaker News

Founded in 2006, Sneaker News is the global authority in sneakers, providing daily coverage of the most coveted sneaker releases and the newest sneakers on the market.

Sneaker News caters to a monthly audience of over 6 million unique readers across 35 million pageviews. It has built the world’s largest sneaker community on social media, with a combined following of over 11 million people. 

Sneaker News also owns Kicksfinder, a digital database of the most popular sneakers, and Jordansdaily, a premier website for everything Jordan-related.

As Sneaker News’ business grew, the team found managing over 80,000 pieces of content increasingly challenging. Additionally, the team struggled to maintain site speed in the face of rapidly growing traffic. Finally, Sneaker News was missing out on the monetary and audience engagement benefits of effectively integrating eBay and Twitter APIs.

The company engaged the services of Multidots due to the company’s extensive experience in the WordPress ecosystem and past work with major publishers like News Corp, SiriusXM, and others.

The Challenge of Scaling Up Capabilities to Effectively Cater to the Multi-Million Audience Demand

Sneaker News’ success was evident by the constantly growing number of readers. Its social following growth was equally impressive.

However, such growth can easily strain resources if not managed appropriately. Sneaker News experienced the following challenges, among others:

  • Managing the site speed with the increasingly heavy traffic was becoming a problem. The high traffic levels posed a serious challenge as system performance risked being slowed with reduced site speed. The high traffic also increased the risk of crashes and made it an alluring target for hackers.
  • The non-uniform code structure throughout the platform had created an unstable database system – a serious concern to the Sneaker News team.
  • Sneakers Team needed to effectively integrate with APIs of Twitter (to display tweets from two different profiles) and of eBay (to increase its affiliate revenue).

Why Sneaker News Chose Multidots

An Inc. 5000 company, Multidots has earned a reputation for world-class expertise in managing complex WordPress-based projects for publishing clients and boasts a portfolio of past clients that includes companies like Tropicana (PepsiCo Venture), Association of American Publishers, and Storyful (Newscorp Venture).

Multidots was selected to complete this project due to its proven track record of successfully executing WordPress projects for enterprise clients in the publishing space. This specialization affords Multidots the depth of expertise that few other agencies can compete with.

How Multidots Created a New, Robust WordPress-Based System

Multidots needed to create a new system for managing Sneaker News’ content. The system needed to be not only efficient but also aligned with the necessary marketing strategies and business logic for reader engagement.

  • Multidots’ team built two advanced, WordPress-based CMS websites – sneakernews.com and jordansdaily.com, under the Enterprise WordPress platform. It identified WordPress VIP to be the most stable and secure platform to build, maintain and scale for such a large transaction portal.
  • The team of engineers at Multidots created a central backend system using the Push and Pull API System on a Core PHP Framework. Now, whenever a visitor rates a sneaker using a specific category or tag, the information is relayed to the central system, where it then passes on to the other website for enhanced collaboration. 
  • Through the Rest API, Multidots synchronized the news and post elements across the mobile app and website.
  • Multidots integrated sneakernews.com and jorddansdaily.com with eBay’s API. This allowed users to purchase the sneakers they were viewing on eBay in a single, uninterrupted experience. The integration gave Sneaker News an affiliate monetization channel, significantly increasing the company’s overall revenue. 
  • Multidots customized the WordPress plugins to include a social sharing count figure, increasing user engagement and transparency. The integration with the relevant Twitter channels made the properties more community-driven and focused.
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Results

Helped Sneaker News grow its business 4x and improve efficiency by 30%

Multidots provided a complete solution for Sneaker News, from assessing the root causes of problems, to managing the project, and ultimately delivering the solution itself. After the redevelopment of the website in WordPress VIP, Sneaker News experienced a 30% efficiency increase in reaching a wider subscriber base.

Enabled Sneaker News to increase its Alexa rank by 1,418 positions in just 3 months

The deployment of new sites significantly boosted Sneaker News’ Alexa ranking due to the superior performance of the properties that Multidots built and the adherence to SEO best practices.

Increased revenue through the integration of affiliate monetization channels

Through Twitter and eBay API integrations, Multidots was able to help Sneaker News strengthen the community element of its business and boost its revenue by monetizing the 34 million monthly page views via affiliate marketing.

Overall Results

Sneaker News was so pleased with the results that it asked Multidots to become a long-term partner. The team at Multidots worked with Sneaker News for five years, which produced numerous other success stories.

As our business grew, it became more and more difficult to manage over 80,000 pieces of content. That’s why we approached Multidots to provide us with an innovative and robust solution to our needs. It was undoubtedly the best business decision we ever made. After working with Multidots we saw our business grow 4x and we increased in efficiency by 30%.

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