Case Study: Country Music Association achieves 71M+ hits, improved uptime and reduced costs with WP Engine

CMA Site Scales to 70M+ Hits on ‘Country Music’s Biggest Night

The Country Music Association (CMA), which runs CMAworld.com and related sites for its 7,000+ members and the public, was struggling with a legacy .NET site that was complex, costly to maintain, and prone to crashes and downtime — including a 30–45 minute outage on the CMA Awards night. Content updates were slow and expensive (upgrades ran about $5,000), and staff spent 10–12 hours a week firefighting server and CMS issues.

CMA migrated its sites to WordPress on fully managed WP Engine hosting, gaining a scalable, easy-to-use platform that eliminated frequent downtime and sped up page loads. The move handled more than 500 million hits in 2014 — including 71+ million on Awards night — cut development costs by over 50%, removed costly upgrade work, and freed the team to focus on content and user experience.

Country Music Association

Ben Bennett

Director of Digital Strategy