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CASE STUDY · WORDPRESS · AWS · GOVERNMENT

Building a Scalable Cloud Platform for a High-Traffic Public Website

Boulder County needed a modern, scalable hosting platform that could support millions of annual page views while improving reliability, reducing maintenance, and lowering long-term infrastructure costs.

The Challenge

A large government website needed a more scalable, modern platform

Boulder County’s website was previously hosted on an on-premises Microsoft SharePoint environment. The county wanted to move to the cloud and transition to an open-source content management system that would be easier to manage, more flexible for content editors, and better prepared for future growth.

The migration involved a large amount of content across many departments, along with the technical challenge of creating a secure, scalable AWS hosting environment for a high-traffic public website.

  • The existing site was hosted on-premises and needed to move to the cloud
  • Content had to be migrated from SharePoint into WordPress across many departments
  • The new platform needed to support a large public-sector website with high reliability
  • Content editors needed tools, templates, and training to manage pages more effectively
  • The hosting environment needed to scale during traffic spikes without unnecessary ongoing costs
  • The migration needed to stay organized while old and new versions of the site were maintained in parallel

What We Did

A cloud-hosted WordPress platform designed for reliability, scale, and efficiency

  • Migrated Boulder County from an on-premises SharePoint environment to WordPress
  • Created a structured content migration process with page statuses and department-level tracking
  • Programmatically scraped content from the old site to give editors a starting point in the new platform
  • Built WordPress templates and editor tools to make content creation easier and more consistent
  • Created a migration dashboard to track progress across departments and keep the project moving
  • Set up WordPress on AWS using Elastic Beanstalk, load-balanced ephemeral servers, and CI/CD deployment workflows
  • Used CDN delivery for static assets including images, CSS, and JavaScript
  • Configured AWS services to support performance, scalability, and long-term reliability
  • Helped Boulder County evaluate AWS commercial cloud versus GovCloud and select the best-fit option
  • Recommended infrastructure improvements over time as newer AWS tools became available
  • Helped establish reserved instances to reduce hosting costs compared with on-demand pricing
  • Provided long-term AWS support and maintenance for the platform
Boulder Country migration status dashboard
The migration process gave Boulder County’s content teams a structured way to move, review, and improve pages across departments.

Infrastructure Architecture

Boulder County moved from an on-premises SharePoint environment to a scalable WordPress platform hosted in the AWS cloud.

Before
Boulder County on premise hosting diagram
After
AWS architecture for Boulder County website

The Result

A stable, scalable platform supporting millions of public website visits

Migrated from on-premises infrastructure to a highly available AWS cloud platform.

The platform supported approximately 6.5 million page views in 2025

Maintained virtually zero downtime while serving millions of annual page views.

Reduced long-term hosting costs by approximately 50–60% through AWS architecture optimization and Reserved Instances

The county gained a more flexible WordPress content management system

The platform has supported nearly a decade of ongoing maintenance, improvements, and growth

The success of the setup helped inform similar cloud migrations for related public-sector websites

10,000+ pages successfully migrated with minimal disruption to County operations.

Key Takeaway

A successful cloud migration is not just about moving a website to new hosting. It requires the right architecture, a realistic content migration process, cost-conscious infrastructure planning, and long-term support as technology evolves.

This project helped Boulder County move to a scalable AWS WordPress platform that has remained reliable, efficient, and adaptable over time.

Is your organization still running critical websites on on-premises infrastructure?

We help organizations migrate complex platforms to AWS with minimal downtime, improved reliability, and long-term operational savings.

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