Case Study: The San Francisco Marathon achieves twice-as-fast page loads and zero downtime during a 400% traffic surge with Cloudflare

Keeping The San Francisco Marathon Website Up And Running

The San Francisco Marathon, with 24,000 runners across five events, depends on its website for registration, race-day organization and timing. After a previous race weekend caused a 400% traffic spike that overwhelmed their servers, the team and independent IT consultant Laura Baalman needed to optimize the site to prevent failures and frustrated racers.

They signed up for the Cloudflare Business plan and enabled Polish and Mirage for image and mobile optimization, which reduced page load times by over 2 seconds and cut page load and page size in half on the image-heavy homepage. As a result the site loaded twice as fast, experienced no downtime during race weekend, handled the heavy load smoothly and delivered a better experience for participants and organizers.

The San Francisco Marathon

Laura Baalman

Independent IT Consultant