Sitefinity Webinar Recap: Scaling for Gold with Olympic-Level Digital Performance
See how USA Swimming worked with Visus to modernize its digital experience in just 90 days, preparing for Olympic-scale traffic with speed, scalability and zero downtime.
For USA Swimming, the Olympic Games bring more than the pressure of competition. They also bring an enormous surge of people looking for results, schedules, news, video and other content online.
In 2021, that surge exposed a problem.
Within 30 minutes of the first session of the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Omaha, USA Swimming’s website crashed. Fans, members and media trying to access results, event schedules and updates were left without the information they needed.
Three years later, the experience couldn’t have been more different.
Ahead of the 2024 Olympic Trials and Paris Games, USA Swimming worked with Progress Sitefinity Premier Partner Visus to modernize its digital infrastructure in just 90 days. The result was a website capable of supporting millions of visitors and dramatic spikes in traffic, with no outages or crashes.
In the webinar Scaling for Gold: Olympic-Level Digital Performance, Michael Daoud, Founder and CEO of Visus, and Patrick Murphy, Managing Director of Technology and Data at USA Swimming, shared what changed between 2021 and 2024 and what other organizations can learn from the transformation.
The Wake-Up Call: When Olympic Traffic Hits
USA Swimming has used Progress Sitefinity as its CMS since 2017. But as Patrick Murphy explained during the webinar, the organization hadn’t adequately prepared its digital infrastructure for the traffic generated by the 2021 Olympic cycle.
That mattered because Olympic years are anything but normal.
USA Swimming supports approximately 375,000 members, from young swimmers competing at local clubs to athletes representing the United States on the world’s biggest stage. During major events such as the Olympic Trials and Olympic Games, traffic to its digital properties increases dramatically.
In 2021, the site wasn’t ready for it.
The website hosted live streams alongside results, schedules, media guides, news and other high-demand content. When it went down during the opening session of the Trials, the impact wasn’t limited to technical performance.
As Murphy explained, once visitors encounter a site that doesn’t load, getting them to come back isn’t easy. USA Swimming had lost an important digital connection with fans, members and media at precisely the moment interest was at its highest.
With the next Olympic cycle approaching, repeating that experience wasn’t an option.
A 90-Day Deadline to Get Ready for 2024
The stakes were even higher heading into 2024.
USA Swimming expected traffic during the Olympic Trials and Paris Games to increase substantially over normal levels. The Trials themselves were also entering new territory: for the first time, a swim meet would be held inside an NFL stadium, with approximately 25,000 spectators attending at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
USA Swimming turned to Visus with a clear objective: prepare the digital experience for the traffic that was coming.
They had approximately 90 days to do it.
Rather than treating modernization as one enormous redevelopment project, the teams focused on the changes that would have the greatest impact before the deadline.
Their strategy centered on five areas:
- Upgrading to a newer version of Sitefinity Cloud
- Adopting the ASP.NET Core Renderer for priority experiences
- Migrating infrastructure to the cloud
- Introducing autoscaling and caching
- Load testing before the events began
Step 1: Upgrade the Foundation
The first move was upgrading USA Swimming from Sitefinity 13.3 to Sitefinity 15.1.
As Michael Daoud explained, the upgrade wasn’t simply about getting onto a newer release. It unlocked capabilities the team needed for the broader modernization effort, particularly the ability to take advantage of the ASP.NET Core Renderer.
The newer architecture enabled the team to separate key parts of the digital experience rather than relying on a traditional setup in which the frontend, CMS and data were served together.
That separation became particularly important once millions of visitors started arriving.
Step 2: Modernize Where It Mattered Most
With only 90 days available, rebuilding every part of USA Swimming’s website wasn’t realistic, or necessary.
Instead, Visus and USA Swimming identified the areas that were most likely to experience heavy traffic:
- Homepage
- Events
- Event details
- Video
- News details
Those experiences were prioritized for the ASP.NET Core Renderer.
The approach allowed the team to create a lightweight frontend application for high-demand pages while other parts of the existing Sitefinity website continued operating as before.
That was an important part of the strategy. Modernization didn’t have to mean waiting until the entire website could be rebuilt. USA Swimming could focus its effort on the experiences where improved performance would matter most, while continuing to modernize incrementally.
Step 3: Move From Fixed Infrastructure to Cloud Scalability
The next part of the project addressed a fundamental problem with preparing infrastructure for unpredictable demand.
With traditional server infrastructure, organizations often provision enough computing power to handle anticipated peaks. For most of the year, much of that capacity may sit unused. And if demand exceeds predictions, even that additional capacity may not be enough.
USA Swimming moved from its on-premises environment to Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS).
The new architecture included separate app service plans for the frontend and CMS, Azure SQL for the database and CI/CD through Azure DevOps to help the teams iterate and deploy more efficiently.
Most importantly for the Olympic traffic challenge, the cloud environment enabled autoscaling.
Instead of maintaining infrastructure sized permanently for peak Olympic demand, resources could scale as traffic increased and contract again as demand fell.
Step 4: Add Another Performance Layer with Caching
The teams also integrated Fastly caching to help serve pages faster.
Pages that didn’t change frequently could be cached and served faster, adding another performance layer during periods of intense demand. This helped reduce the amount of work required from the underlying infrastructure each time visitors requested commonly accessed content.
Alongside the ASP.NET Core Renderer and Azure autoscaling, caching became another part of the broader performance strategy. The goal wasn’t one single fix, but multiple layers working together to keep the digital experience fast and responsive as traffic climbed.
Step 5: Test Before the World Arrived
There was one final question to answer before the Olympic Trials began:
Would it actually work?
While it was difficult to replicate the scale of real Olympic traffic, the teams used load testing in Azure to put the new architecture under pressure and validate how pages responded.
It provided a critical check before USA Swimming entered the period when there would be little room for error.
As Daoud explained during the webinar, load testing should be part of the preparation for organizations expecting significant traffic, rather than leaving real users to test the limits of the site.
From a Crash in 2021 to Zero Outages in 2024
Then came the real test.
During the 2024 Olympic Trials, USA Swimming saw traffic increase by approximately 800–850% compared with a typical week.
The website stayed up.
Millions of visitors were supported with no outages or crashes, while fast load times were maintained throughout the Trials and the Olympic period that followed.
For Patrick Murphy, perhaps the best measure of success came during a staff celebration after the Trials.
He realized something unusual had happened: nobody had talked to him about the website.
After the experience of 2021, silence was exactly what the technology team wanted.
“No news is good news.”
The digital experience had simply worked while attention remained where it belonged, on the swimming.
What Can Other Digital Teams Take from USA Swimming?
Most organizations aren’t preparing their websites for an Olympic Games. But unpredictable traffic isn’t unique to global sporting events.
Product launches, major announcements, ticket releases, seasonal peaks, campaigns and breaking news can all put digital infrastructure under pressure.
USA Swimming’s experience shows the value of prioritizing where modernization can have the greatest impact. Rather than rebuilding everything at once, the teams focused on high-traffic experiences, introduced an architecture that could scale with demand and tested it before the traffic arrived.
The project also demonstrated the value of keeping the underlying platform current, with the upgrade to Sitefinity 15.1 unlocking capabilities that became central to the modernization effort.
USA Swimming went from a site crashing within 30 minutes of Olympic Trials traffic to supporting millions of visitors without an outage, all following a focused 90-day modernization effort.
If you missed the live session, or would like to hear more about USA Swimming’s journey from the 2021 challenges to its Olympic-scale performance in 2024, you can watch the webinar on demand to hear the full story from USA Swimming and Visus.
