Case Study: SpanishDict achieves faster site performance and pinpointed code-level insights with New Relic

Global Spanish Learning site ups performance using New Relic

SpanishDict, founded in 1999, is the world’s largest Spanish–English dictionary and language-learning site, drawing about 5 million visitors per month. As a small team supporting a PHP/CodeIgniter stack with MySQL, memcache, ElasticSearch and CDNs, rapid growth made site performance critical for learners and translators; prior toolsets were fragmented and offered little holistic visibility, stretching the team and risking user disengagement.

SpanishDict implemented New Relic for unified application performance monitoring—quick to deploy and able to trace transactions down to specific lines of code while prioritizing issues. That visibility let the team pinpoint and fix slow SQL queries and identify inconsistent third‑party services (and develop workarounds), speeding the site, improving productivity, and giving ongoing clarity into performance bottlenecks.

SpanishDict

Chris Cummings

CEO