Case Study: Wendy’s High School Heisman achieves zero-downtime peak performance with Switchbox

Wendy’s High School Heisman handles 100,000+ applicants with Switchbox

The nonprofit Wendy's High School Heisman faced a significant challenge when traffic spikes from winner announcements repeatedly crashed their website, which supports over 100,000 applicant athletes annually. They partnered with vendor Switchbox to build a cloud-based, high-availability platform that could handle these millions of searches while ensuring strict security compliance for student data.

Switchbox engineered a custom cloud solution using WordPress as a CMS core, extended with a custom web application for search and data aggregation. This system was built from the ground up for peak traffic and security, complying with COPPA and FERPA. The result was flawless performance with zero downtime during critical events, drastically improved response times, and a platform that has supported the award's growing popularity.

Wendy’s High School Heisman