Infobae: Replatforming to drive exponential audience growth

A Good Problem to Have?

When Infobae first launched on Arc XP in 2016, the site buildout was completed in just three months, and traffic more than doubled in the first year. Accustomed to moving fast, Infobae continued moving full speed ahead opening numerous bureaus outside their Buenos Aires headquarters, from Montevideo and Mexico City to Miami and New York. In late 2019, Infobae launched new content verticals in gaming and the economy, helping to fuel major traffic growth.

18 years after its founding, Infobae’s growth was truly meteoric, as the site was first in Argentina, second in Mexico, and in the top ten of every Spanish speaking country. Year over year, from March 2019 to March 2020, Infobae’s traffic rose 61 percent in Argentina, 177 percent in Chile, 198 percent in Colombia, 459 percent in Mexico, 166 percent in Peru, and 212 percent in Spain. By the spring of 2020, the site was recording over 140 million unique monthly visitors and more than 1 billion page views.

Rebuilding in React

Four years after its initial buildout, the site was showing its age. While SEO still performed highly, the website could still improve its accessibility and performance metrics. As the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc across the world, Infobae’s readers needed the site more than ever, and Infobae’s executives knew it was time for an update.

Working with Arc XP, Infobae.com underwent an invisible overhaul. When the Infobae site went live on Arc XP four years earlier, the original site had been built on JSP. Since then, Arc XP rebuilt its rendering engine around React.JS. Leaving the successful site design untouched, the Arc XP team proceeded to refactor Infobae’s site code into React, allowing for numerous architectural improvements, particularly in the areas of site performance, SEO and accessibility.

Immediate Results

The improvements were both major and immediate. Site performance, as measured by Google Lighthouse, improved by 98 percent, and SEO score improved from an already good 83 to an eye-popping 99 points out of 100. Accessibility improved by more than 90 percent.

These metrics demonstrated to Infobae leadership that their site was ready to welcome more users than ever, and to keep bringing them back for many visits and many years in the future.

“Our strategy is to offer journalism that surprises, excites and makes you think. We work every day with passion and professionalism to improve the quality of the journalism we offer and to innovate the ways in which we reach our audience,” said Daniel Hadad, founder and CEO of Infobae. “In Arc XP, we have a partner with a committed team, efficient tools, a secure platform and products that evolve quickly. This allows us to start the decade by expanding the Infobae newsroom in Latin America and launching a significantly faster version of our site.”

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