In its field, few can claim to have the same legacy. Snopes.com, a fact-checking website, has been online since 1994: almost as long as the World Wide Web has existed. It is one of the oldest and best-known resources of its kind, spearheading a culture of empowered media consumers with a unique approach to investigative journalism.

Agility, speed, and flexibility: Hosting one of the USA’s busiest websites

Snopes handles an average of 12 – 20 million visitors a month, with demands on the site occurring unpredictably and causing large peaks in traffic. Vinny Green, VP of Operations and co-owner of Snopes, approached the team at roots.io, an organization focused on supporting open source peer production with WordPress. The project was then handed over to the infrastructure expert at roots.io, Nathaniel Schweinberg, who is also a Systems Engineer at Human Made.

Our expertise in managing websites of this size and scale meant we were confident in being able to tackle the challenges of this project, so we were able to quickly step in and boost delivery, supporting Snopes throughout the transition to our fully managed digital experience platform, Altis.

Migrating to a fully-managed infrastructure built for scale

Human Made joined Snopes to migrate their hosting stack to our cloud infrastructure – a stack geared towards complex, high traffic WordPress sites at scale. Our goal was to deliver a service that ensured Snopes remained highly performant, fast, and always available.

Boosting website performance

In order to speed up their local development and improve the performance of the live site with more optimizations, we rebuilt Snopes’s production and development build pipeline by moving it to Webpack. We did this for several reasons related to improved performance and facilitating developer processes:

• Improved frontend features: Using Webpack makes it easier to build on and improve frontend code. We were able to add improved features such as hot reloading, style swapping, and better source maps, to name a few.
• Future-proofing code: It allows Snopes to use modern language features for SCSS (‘Sassy’ CSS, a superset of CSS3’s syntax) and JavaScript, making the code more secure in the face of future changes, as well as encouraging better development practices. In addition, it also better prepares Snopes for a move to Gutenberg: the new WordPress editor which was merged in the WordPress 5.0 release.
• Greater control: It gives us more control over how the code is built out for production, so Snopes can efficiently reduce the final amount of code served to the user and speed up the site.

To further improve site performance, we minified Snopes’ production JavaScript files: a process that removes redundant or unnecessary code and converts it into a smaller form without jeopardizing the functionality. This significantly reduced the amount of code served to the user, and in turn, significantly improved site speed.