The TwinSpires Edge

Milestones

Launched.

January 2020

500,000.

Monthly page views - October 2021

Betting Calculators.

Betting calculators added - February 2022

Widgets.

Horse racing widgets added - May 2022

Overview

Churchill Downs, a horse racing complex known as the home of the Kentucky Derby, was publishing dozens of blog articles every single day. Their existing WordPress CMS (Content Management System) was getting slow and required too much upkeep. They asked us for help.

The Problem

How to replace their existing WordPress CMS boasting 30,000+ articles with an extremely fast, easy-to-use solution?

The Solution

We created a two-pronged approach. The first solution was to implement a headless CMS (Gatsby) and migrate all of the existing articles into static pages. Our second solution takes those static (extremely fast loading) pages and introduces them to Netlify. Netlify manages the entire CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) process by building and deploying static pages to a CDN (content delivery network). Once the pages are loaded onto a CDN, they are easily accessible from many locations worldwide at lightning speeds.

Design

As we refreshed the design for The TwinSpires Edge we worked closely with the Churchill Downs marketing team to ensure we followed the TwinSpires brand guidelines. We aimed to create a clean, news-style website with a focus on highlighting what matters most to the user.