Kaufman International
What’s Trending
Turning a WordPress site that crashed during traffic spikes into a stable, automated, AI-assisted publishing platform that has run without an outage for two years.
What’s Trending covers pop culture and viral news, so its biggest traffic arrives without warning, the moment a story takes off. Before Kaufman International got involved, those spikes regularly took the WordPress site offline at exactly the moments it mattered most. Publishing video was slow too: each approved video had to be moved by hand from Frame.io to JW Player and then onto the site.
Kaufman International stabilized the platform, automated the video pipeline, and later added AI tools that help the editorial team publish faster and keep the site’s archive organized and accessible.
Stability Under Traffic Spikes
Fixed in a week: Kaufman International resolved the traffic-spike outages within one week of starting, scaling the site to serve a much larger web and streaming audience.
Rebuilt caching: Updated the site’s caching so traffic surges are served from cache instead of overwhelming WordPress and the database.
Migration to WP Engine: Moved the site to a more robust managed hosting environment at WP Engine, built to absorb sudden spikes.
Tuned with WP Engine’s engineers: Worked directly with WP Engine’s engineering team to optimize the environment for What’s Trending’s traffic patterns.
Managed deployment: Custom plugins are deployed to staging and production on WP Engine through GitHub Actions, so changes are tested before they reach readers.
Automated Video Publishing
Frame.io to JW Player to WordPress: Custom WordPress plugins move approved videos from Frame.io to JW Player and publish them on the site automatically, with no manual steps.
Google video sitemap: A custom plugin rebuilds the site’s video sitemap whenever a video is saved, giving Google each video’s title, description, thumbnail, duration, publish date, and creator. Unpublished videos are marked with an expiration date so they drop out of search.
AI-Assisted Publishing
Automatic story summaries: OpenAI generates a short bulleted summary for each article and video, displayed at the top of the story, with an override for editors.
AI alt text: A vision model writes concise, descriptive alt text for images, naming identifiable people and brands, improving accessibility and image search. Command-line tools process the entire media library in bulk.
AI category cleanup: A category manager uses AI to check every post in the archive against a category’s description and assign it where it fits, with CSV import for bulk changes.
Results
Zero outages in two years: The site has run without a single outage since the infrastructure overhaul, through the traffic spikes that used to take it down.
Search-driven audience: 92% of search clicks come from non-branded searches, so readers find What’s Trending through its content, not just its name.
Visible across Google: Stories and videos appear in Google News, News search, image search, and video search.
Hands-off video publishing: Approved videos go live without manual uploading or re-entering details.
Technology: WordPress · PHP · Frame.io · JW Player · Google Video Sitemaps · OpenAI · WP-CLI · WP Engine · GitHub Actions
[ Visit What’s Trending ]“Before we hired KI, our site was frequently unavailable due to traffic spikes during peak usage periods. Within a week of hiring, they scaled the platforms and services to serve a much larger web and streaming audience, achieving 24/7 availability and improving our SEO to help us grow a larger audience.”