Amanda McNeal

The Golden Globes website needed a modern, resilient platform to support both editorial workflows and real-time event engagement. Hosted on WordPress VIP, the site had to meet strict enterprise code standards, perform reliably under heavy traffic, and deliver a seamless user experience for press and fans on awards night.

The project goals included:

• Enabling editors to manage structured award and nomination data without custom database tables
• Delivering interactive, React-powered front-end experiences (e.g. searchable awards database, dynamic live feed)
• Preventing downtime during traffic spikes of over two million users
• Maintaining full compatibility with WPVIP’s deployment pipeline, coding standards, and platform requirements

• WPVIP strongly discourages unmanaged custom database tables and requires that all code pass PHP_CodeSniffer rulesets before deployment. Build artifacts must be committed to the repo unless using their custom CI pipeline.
• Schema changes through plugins or custom code are subject to VIP review. To avoid complexity and getting VIP involved, I used native post types and ACF fields to model structured content like nominations.
• The site needed to operate reliably under intense, short-term traffic loads without dynamic scaling. The client controlled hosting through WPVIP but did not actively manage infrastructure or autoscaling, so performance and reliability had to be engineered at the application level.
• Live content features such as the awards feed and the show-night “Live Feed” required features like polling for updates, client-side pagination, and smooth UX without forcing page reloads or preloading excessive data.

I developed a custom WordPress theme with integrated React applications, handling both the backend logic (PHP, ACF, custom REST API routes) and frontend architecture (React, Webpack, hydration strategy).

• Structured content modeling: Used ACF to build a normalized editorial system for awards and nominees. Editors entered complex data using a clean admin UI without needing to manage schema directly.
• REST API layer: Created a custom namespace of REST routes (e.g. /awdb/v1/nominations) to serve award data. Routes included support for filtering, pagination, and caching to reduce load and improve response times.
• React integration: I built a set of focused React apps to power features like the Awards Database, Winners and Nominees list, and Live Coverage. Each app was scoped to its specific purpose and mounted to a corresponding WordPress template. State was managed locally within the component tree to handle filters, pagination, and dynamic search, which kept the interactions fast and self-contained. Components were organized into logical, reusable units such as filters, search inputs, pagination, and content blocks, making the codebase easy to extend and maintain without adding unnecessary complexity.

• Performance optimization: Prioritized lazy loading for images and content, used srcset for responsive image handling, and implemented pagination to avoid over-fetching. This applied across all major front-end components.
• Aggressive caching: Data that did not update during the live event was cached heavily and, in many cases, served as static output. This reduced database queries to near zero during peak traffic.
• UX tradeoffs for the Live Feed: Rather than preload hundreds of posts and images, I implemented lazy loading with content buffering. This delivered a lightweight, fast experience for most users without compromising perceived performance.
• Live updates via polling: The Live Feed used a custom polling system to retrieve tagged content updates in real time without requiring manual page refreshes.
• Mailchimp integration: Built a secure newsletter signup route with reCAPTCHA validation using a custom REST endpoint.
• Structured API design: REST routes supported custom filters and pagination, making them scalable across multiple React apps.

• The site handled over 2.5 million views on the night of the 2025 Golden Globes with no downtime or critical issues.
• Editors were able to update structured data (nominees, winners, metadata) through the WordPress admin without needing technical intervention.
• React-powered components provided interactive experiences for the public while maintaining strong SEO and accessibility support.
• Core Web Vitals scores remained excellent during the live event:
  • First Contentful Paint: 1.0s
  • Largest Contentful Paint: 1.1s
  • Total Blocking Time: 0ms
  • Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.003
• The Live Feed feature was viewed over 113,000 times on show night and functioned smoothly under load.
• The platform has successfully supported two consecutive years of Golden Globes traffic spikes without performance degradation or infrastructure intervention.