Case Study: Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board achieves 10-second faster load times and handles 860% traffic spikes with Pantheon

L.A. Tourism Optimizes Media Rich Site for Online Programming to Support Local Businesses

The Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, the city’s official destination marketing organization, runs a media-rich site and a dineL.A. microsite that drives visibility for local restaurants. Periodic event-driven traffic spikes—up to roughly 800–860%—plus large edge-to-edge images caused pages to slow to as much as 13 seconds, strained a small IT team, and required a seamless migration path from Drupal 8 to 9 with no downtime.

Working with Pantheon, the team adopted Advanced Global CDN Image Optimization, automated image refactoring, Dev‑Test‑Live workflows, Terminus, CircleCI and a dedicated Customer Success Manager to support an iterative Drupal 9 upgrade. The result: a ~10‑second improvement in speed index, 70% better image compression (reducing image delivery from 20.1 TB to 6.11 TB), consistent performance during an 860% pageview spike, and up to a 140% increase in Time on Page, along with lower bounce and improved conversions.

Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board

Bao Truong

Director of Engineering