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Paddy Power News
I designed, built and still run Paddy Power News: a bespoke, high-traffic WordPress betting-news platform for one of the UK and Ireland’s best-known bookmakers. I took it from the architecture right through to the day-to-day, and I engineered it to stay fast under World-Cup-scale traffic. Full-stack development, AWS cloud architecture, real-time betting content, performance, security and SEO, and a great deal of the product thinking too.
- 3+ yrsLead engineer and cloud architect
- 1,600+Commits shipped, and counting
- 100×Faster on-site search, re-engineered
- 60+Tracked features and fixes delivered
The brief
Paddy Power News needed to be far more than a blog. It had to publish editorial content at pace, surface live betting markets right inside articles, and stay quick and stable when a big tournament sends traffic through the roof, all while ranking in search and meeting modern accessibility standards.
I took it on end to end: the AWS cloud infrastructure, the WordPress platform and the extensive custom plugin work behind it, the real-time betting integrations, and the performance, security and SEO work that keeps it fast and found. I delivered it as lead developer in collaboration with Totaal, and I still maintain and grow it today.
A fair bit of the work started as a brief, often built around a specific event or tournament. What I tend to do is take that starting point and push it further: flesh it out with ideas of my own, and build experimental versions in the background. When the client liked what they saw, it got rolled out across the site. So a good deal of what the platform does today began as something I proposed or prototyped, rather than something I was strictly asked for.
What I built
- A bespoke publishing platformA custom WordPress block theme backed by extensive custom plugin work and deep bespoke optimisation. Fast, flexible editorial tools instead of off-the-shelf bloat.
- Real-time betting contentLive odds, NAPs selection tables, Bet Banners, a bet calculator and tournament brackets rendered straight into articles from a real-time sportsbook data layer, refreshed to the minute and safely cached.
- An analytics command centreBet-interaction tracking feeding bespoke dashboards, so the team can see exactly what content drives engagement and conversions.
- Cloud infrastructure at scaleAWS infrastructure and managed hosting, sized to scale up for traffic spikes and back down for cost.
- A performance engineA custom, edge-grade caching layer plus deep database and query tuning to hold up under heavy, spiky load.
- Security and hardeningWeb-application firewalling and bot control, encrypted delivery, least-privilege access and continuous monitoring.
- SEO foundationStructured data, sitemaps, crawl optimisation and modern image delivery built in for strong organic visibility.
- AccessibilityAn accessibility-first front end with a user-facing accessibility panel, working towards WCAG standards.
- Editorial toolingPundit tips, cheat sheets, video reels, carousels, popular posts, live weather and team and event features, purpose-built for sports content.
Taking briefs further
Not everything here was my idea, and I would never claim otherwise. A lot of it arrived as a brief, often tied to an event or a tournament. My habit is to take that starting point and run with it, adding ideas and building experimental versions in the background. When the client liked them, they got rolled out. These are some of the things that grew out of that.
- The Command CentreA fullscreen, auto-refreshing dashboard designed for a wall-mounted office screen, so the team can watch live market and content activity at a glance.
- A live bet tickerA ticker of the most popular bets, driven by real interaction data.
- Author leaderboardA leaderboard that ranks writers by how well their betting content actually performs.
- Timed content nudgesA gentle, non-intrusive way to slot campaign messages in at natural reading breakpoints rather than pop-ups. I first built it for a Prostate Cancer UK awareness campaign, then made it reusable for any cause.
- In-article carouselsSocial-style cards that surface related posts inside articles to keep readers moving through the site.
- Racecards and resultsBringing racecards and fast results in-house, as both a standalone app and an in-article block, instead of sending readers off-site.
- Dark modeA proper, considered dark mode, because the audience is broad and mostly on mobile.
Real-time betting, built for editorial
This is the work I am proudest of. I built the whole facility that turns live betting data into something the editorial team can actually use. Writers never touch code or raw feeds. They get a set of custom blocks and an admin interface I designed, so they can build their own Bet Banners and NAPs selection tables, add bet builders and bet calculators, pick exactly the markets and selections they want, and drop them straight into an article, where they render live and refresh to the minute.
Behind that interface sits all the caching, tracking and safeguards that keep it reliable. Betting components are deliberately kept out of full-page caching and served fresh from short-lived caches, so even a fully cached article always shows current odds rather than stale ones. Every interaction is tracked and fed into a bespoke command centre dashboard that shows the team exactly what content is driving engagement and conversions.
The custom plugins behind it
Almost everything the platform does runs on plugins I built for it from the ground up. Here are some of the bigger ones.
- The betting engineThe heart of it: connects to the live betting APIs and gives editors the blocks and admin interface to build Bet Banners and NAPs tables from real-time data, with its own caching, freshness controls and click tracking.
- Bet calculatorAn interactive bet calculator block that editors can tie to specific events.
- Tournament bracketsInteractive, fully customisable tournament brackets as a drop-in block.
- Mini-gamesReusable blocks for playable Paddy Power Games experiences inside articles.
- Reels video feedA vertical, one-video-per-screen feed in the style of Reels and Shorts for the site’s sports clips, reactions and highlights.
- PunditsA block for managing and displaying pundit tips alongside event data.
- Teams and EventsCustom Teams and Events taxonomies with colour, logo and icon data per term, and a block to surface them across templates.
- Site searchAn AJAX live-suggestion search, plus an indexed FULLTEXT engine I built to replace the slow default search across every query path.
- Popular postsA taxonomy-aware most-popular-posts block, cached for speed.
- Priority navigationA Priority+ style menu that tucks overflowing nav items into a tidy More dropdown.
- WeatherA dynamic, event-aware weather forecast block.
- FAQ builderAn FAQ system with safe batch tools and SEO-friendly redirects.
- Accessibility panelA slide-out panel of reader accessibility controls.
- A/B template testingConditional, category-aware content blocks with built-in A/B testing.
On top of those sit the reusable ones I have generalised and open-sourced, including the caching engine, the SEO toolkit and the image optimiser. See my open-source work.
Reading the gaps in the data
A live betting feed is never as tidy as you would like. A big part of my job was working out exactly what the sportsbook API could and could not give us, then engineering around the gaps. That meant sensible fallbacks when a field was missing, normalising inconsistent naming so the same sport or selection always matched, deriving information the feed did not provide directly, and adding retries and validation so a wobble in the data never turned into a broken page.
I also handled the wider data assessment: auditing what was stored and how, migrating legacy content into cleaner structures, and building self-healing routines that aggregate and tidy the betting and interaction data on a schedule, so the reporting stays accurate over time.
Engineered for World-Cup-scale traffic
Sports-betting news is spiky by nature. A big fixture or a tournament can multiply traffic in minutes. Rather than simply throw hardware at the problem, I engineered the platform to absorb it.
- Custom caching engineA bespoke full-page and object cache with dynamic-fragment expansion and Brotli and Gzip compression, so pages serve instantly while live betting content stays fresh.
- Search, 100× fasterI re-engineered on-site search from a query that could take over two minutes into one that returns in milliseconds, with a safe, zero-downtime rollout.
- Database at scaleI tamed hundreds of thousands of cache and option rows, cutting per-request overhead and keeping the database healthy under sustained load.
- Resilience by designCircuit-breakers and safe fallbacks mean that if a dependency wobbles, the site keeps serving rather than failing.
On a cache miss, the page is rendered once, dynamic betting blocks are lifted into placeholders, then minified, compressed and stored, so the very next visitor gets the fast path.
Three years of delivery
This is not a launch and leave project. It is a platform I have built and evolved continuously, over 1,600 commits and counting, spanning betting features, performance, editorial tooling, SEO and accessibility.
Built around the sport
A sports-betting audience does not want a generic site. They follow specific sports, so a lot of my work has been building features that fit each one properly.
- Horse racingRacing is central to what they do, so it got a lot of attention: NAPs selection tables for tipsters, bespoke templates for the Grand National and Aintree Festival, bringing racecards and results in-house, auto-categorising racing content, and handling the fiddly cases like a horse running at several times on the same day.
- DartsFor darts I built a set of playful, on-brand components, including a darts ticker with nines tracking and a dynamic intro, and a player nickname and shirt treatment that renders each player in their own style.
- Football and tournamentsFor the big tournaments I built live match context: versus displays, group standings, penalty shoot-outs, squad line-ups with player photos and bios, and match-summary infographics that update as results come in.
Infrastructure, security and operations
I do not just write the code, I run the platform. The AWS infrastructure is mine to architect and manage, tuned to scale up for demand and back down for cost, and I handle the day-to-day server administration behind it: the web servers, the managed in-memory cache, memory and process tuning, scheduled jobs, and backups with tested recovery.
On security, I set up and tuned the web application firewall and bot protection at the edge, including the awkward real-world cases, like making sure the official app and genuine editors always get through cleanly while bad traffic does not. Add encrypted transport, least-privilege access, hardened application code and continuous monitoring, and the result is a platform that stays fast, stays up, and is hard to knock over.
- Web application firewall and bot controlSet up and tuned at the edge, balanced so real users and the official app are never wrongly blocked.
- AWS architectureDesigned and managed to scale with demand and stay cost-efficient.
- Server administrationWeb servers, caching, memory and process tuning, and scheduled jobs.
- Data assessment and migrationAuditing, cleaning and migrating the data, with self-healing routines that keep reporting accurate.
- Monitoring and resilienceHealth monitoring, circuit-breakers and safe fallbacks, so the site degrades gracefully rather than catastrophically.
- Backups and recoveryAutomated backups with tested recovery, so data is safe.
In my words
So whose ideas were these?
A mix, and I would not want to overclaim. Plenty came in as briefs, often around a specific event or tournament. But my instinct is to take a brief and push it further, suggest more, and quite often build an experimental version in the background. When the client liked it, it got rolled out. So a good number of the features people use started as something I proposed or prototyped, rather than something I was strictly told to make.
What are you most proud of?
Handling all the betting data, and building the whole facility around it. I created the system that connects to the live betting APIs and, just as importantly, the interface that lets the editorial team build their own Bet Banners and NAPs tables without ever seeing a line of code or a raw feed. Getting that to be live, accurate and fast at the same time is the thing I am most pleased with.
Where did the mini-games and tournaments come from?
Some of it was driven by a specific event, and some of it was me experimenting. Either way, interactive things keep readers around, so I built a reusable way to ship playable mini-games and tournament brackets as simple blocks. The team can reuse them season after season without needing me every time.
How do you keep live odds accurate on a cached site?
Carefully. The page frame is cached and compressed for speed, but the betting components are deliberately excluded and rendered fresh from short-lived caches, so readers always see current prices, never stale ones.
You built this with Totaal. How did that work?
Totaal owned the relationship and the wider direction, and I owned the technical build. It has been a genuinely collaborative few years, and I have been the constant on the engineering side throughout.
Related services
Need a platform like this?
Whether it is a high-traffic build, a bespoke WordPress platform, AWS hosting, or performance and SEO for your business, I would love to hear about it. Drop me a line at shane@acemedia.ninja, or find me on socials.