Preparing Green Street News for huge growth in global real estate markets

About Green Street News

Green Street News provides exclusive insights into real estate market movements, delivering breaking news to their subscribers on the biggest real estate stories in the UK and pan-European markets.

As the Green Street News business (formerly React News) started to grow quicker and enter more international markets, their website was becoming drastically unfit for purpose.

With their swelling subscriber base flocking to the website immediately following Green Street News’ exclusive email alerts, its underlying structure started to jeopardise the site’s stability and user experience. 

This is how the Human Made team rebuilt the Green Street News site to help secure the future success and stability of their business model.

Fixing website growth barriers

Green Street News was growing, but its website couldn’t handle traffic demands as their legacy code and outdated architecture wasn’t built for rising subscribers and visitors.

Some plug-ins became obsolete, and others couldn’t meet the business’s needs. The site also fell short of Green Street News’ goal to optimise advertising space.

Their CMS, a non-standard WordPress setup using Timber, didn’t follow best practices and struggled with traffic spikes driven by market news emails and push notifications. Surpassing its fixed capacity caused crashes, risking ad revenue and Green Street News’ reputation for real-time, critical market updates.

Green Street News needed a scalable website to handle traffic surges, ensuring uninterrupted subscriber growth and ad revenue.

Powering Green Street News’ traffic surges

Human Made set out to rebuild and migrate the site onto Altis – their cloud-native WordPress hosting platform – in a modular way, adhering to high standards of WordPress coding to support the long-term stability and feature growth on the platform.

Green Street News sees predictable traffic spikes twice daily via scheduled email notifications to subscribers. To prepare for these surges, we built ‘scheduled autoscaling’ into the Altis platform, pre-programming increased server capacity at these times, and also catches unforeseen fluctuations when they arise.

This approach delivers subscribers a more consistent digital experience, eliminates downtime-related ad revenue loss, and saves Green Street News money on wasted capacity outside of peak traffic times. Scheduled autoscaling has since become a standard feature for Altis Cloud users.

Altis Analytics also delivers Green Street News native first-party data, a primary source of analytics to understand and optimise user experience.

Future-proofing web publishing

In recent years, we’ve been committed to enhancing the technological alignment for Green Street News and its previous company React News. This included laying the groundwork for a transition to a headless CMS, integrating property data, and implementing single sign-on via Auth0 for a seamless user experience across both websites. We also supported Green Street’s tech team with consultancy services to ensure a unified approach to business goals.

Additionally, we migrated subscription management to MailChimp, optimised ad placement and management, and cleaned up non-performant plugins to improve site performance. Code updates ensured better compatibility with the Altis hosting platform, and new taxonomies were added to articles for improved content organisation.

These projects reinforced the technological alignment between React News and Green Street, delivering a more unified user experience across both platforms.