High-traffic publishing with protected digital products

One platform had to publish to a large audience, sell three kinds of product and keep premium research from leaking. We combined enterprise WordPress hosting, a WooCommerce storefront and per-buyer PDF watermarking, with recovery tools so the support team can fix failed files without engineering.

800K+ daily pageviews, 1.5M+ on event days
Under 2-second loads at peak
No downtime recorded during event surges

Service: Enterprise Web Platforms

The challenge

One platform had to do three jobs at once: publish to a large audience (800K+ daily pageviews, rising past 1.5M on event days), sell physical goods, digital downloads and video on demand, and protect premium research, the publisher’s main asset, from leaking.

What we did

Built the publishing platform on enterprise WordPress hosting, with a blog, knowledge centre and search.
Set up a WooCommerce storefront that handles all three fulfilment models: shipping, downloads and streaming.
Built an asynchronous watermarking pipeline that embeds the buyer’s details in every PDF they buy.
Added a companion admin tool so the support team can find failed watermarking jobs, re-run them or re-deliver files without an engineering ticket.
Added a gated event module: attendees verify their ticket by email to unlock event-only downloads.
Tuned Redis and CDN caching, and pre-warmed the cache before scheduled events.

Key decisions

Asynchronous watermarking. Buyers get instant confirmation at checkout; a slow watermarking service never holds up a purchase.
Recovery as a feature. We built tooling for failures alongside the happy path, so support can fix problems without engineering.
Email-based ticket checks. Verification matches how tickets were sold, with email as the common identifier.

What this delivered

The platform publishes to a large audience, sells physical goods, downloads and video on demand, and keeps premium research protected with a watermark per buyer. Support can re-run failed files without an engineering ticket, and the cache is pre-warmed before scheduled events.