Case Study: Pan Macmillan achieves a scalable, high-performance Gruffalo website with Kentico

Pan Macmillan - Customer Case Study

The Gruffalo, one of the world’s best‑loved children’s characters, needed a new online home from Pan Macmillan ahead of the book’s 15‑year anniversary. Distinction (with Aardman) was commissioned to design a site that would delight young children while still engaging older kids, families and adults, and that could cope with heavy, graphic‑rich traffic across a wide range of devices — all while deploying a Kentico site on Azure with strong performance and scalability.

Distinction ran collaborative workshops, chose responsive design for cross‑device compatibility, and deployed Kentico EMS on Windows Azure with SQL Azure to scale for traffic spikes and optimise performance. The site was warmly received and handled substantial demand: 121,048 visits from over 160 countries, regularly 1,500+ visits/day in January 2014, page load times under 4 seconds (avg download 0.18s), 4.3 pages/visit and a 4‑minute average session, with over 35% of traffic from mobile/tablet — meeting the project’s usability and performance goals.

Pan Macmillan

James Luscombe

Head of Web Development