WordPress Rebuild & Optimization

Overview

Sweetwater's content ecosystem includes InSync, a massive WordPress-based blog with more than 40,000 articles serving musicians and audio professionals worldwide. The site had grown organically over years of expansion, resulting in slow load times, legacy dependencies, and a fragile hosting setup.

When I took over leadership of the development pod responsible for media and content services, our goal was to modernize the entire publishing infrastructure—improving speed, stability, and scalability while unifying our custom WordPress ecosystem.

The Challenge

The legacy InSync site was running on-premises with custom code that directly queried multiple internal databases. It had little separation of concerns and poor performance characteristics:

• •Average page loads of 3–6 seconds for blog and article pages
• •Spaghetti-style code and plugins tightly coupled to Sweetwater's core applications
• •No horizontal scalability, making the site vulnerable to traffic surges during major promotions
• •Image hosting still tied to legacy on-prem servers

Additionally, each WordPress instance across the company maintained its own set of custom plugins—hard to update, inconsistent, and difficult to test.

The Approach

Under my direction, the team rebuilt the entire project from the ground up with a cloud-native architecture in Google Cloud:

• ✓Full containerization and redeployment of WordPress on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
• ✓Implemented a shared file system using Elastic Block Storage (EBS) in GCP so multiple pods could share a common disk state—a critical solution since WordPress writes frequently to the filesystem
• ✓Rebuilt and consolidated plugins: from roughly 20 custom plugins down to 5 core modules, each isolated, reusable, and version-controlled via Git submodules
• ✓Integrated with the new Media API (Laravel + Fastly + GCS) to offload 40,000+ article images to cloud storage with on-the-fly optimization
• ✓Collaborated closely with the Platform Engineering team to define scaling rules, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines for deployments

Results

• ✓Performance: Reduced average load times from 3–6 seconds to 50–100 milliseconds—a >90% improvement
• ✓Scalability: Enabled horizontal scaling for high-traffic events like Black Friday and holiday promotions
• ✓Maintainability: Centralized and standardized plugin architecture across all Sweetwater WordPress environments
• ✓Reliability: Eliminated direct cross-database dependencies, improving stability and data security
• ✓Consistency: Unified media delivery through the same API service used by Sweetwater.com, ensuring cohesive performance across the brand

Technology Stack

Key Takeaways

• ✓Thoughtful architecture and cross-team collaboration can transform legacy systems into modern, scalable infrastructure
• ✓Kubernetes provides excellent horizontal scalability for content-heavy WordPress deployments
• ✓Shared file systems (EBS) solve WordPress's multi-pod challenges in containerized environments
• ✓Plugin consolidation (20 → 5) dramatically reduces complexity and improves maintainability
• ✓Git submodules enable independent plugin versioning across multiple WordPress instances
• ✓Centralized media APIs create consistency and performance gains across all brand properties