People always ask us two things about Web Agency Summit. First, how does a small team pull such a HUGE virtual event.
And second, once we tell them what it’s built on, there’s usually a long pause.
“…this whole thing runs on WordPress?”
Every video room. Every live chat. Every sponsor booth and session schedule. WordPress. All of it, how cool is that?
So we figured it was time to pop the hood and show you how the whole thing actually works.
Quick Backstory
If you want the full origin story of how the summit came to be (canceled flights, a crashed platform, a pandemic), we recently wrote a blog on it. The short version: WordCamp Asia got canceled a week before we were supposed to attend, Vito stayed up for a week and a half straight and built the first version of this platform.
Well, not from scratch. And that’s the whole point.
The philosophy from day one was: find plugins that get you 80% of the way there, then customize the last 20%.
The Tech Stack
Here’s what actually powers the platform (no gatekeeping here 😉).
BuddyBoss is a WordPress theme built for online communities and membership sites.
We use it as the theme, but we’ve stripped out about 95% of it. We only use it for the login system, user profiles, and messaging. Everything else, gone.
Toolset is the real backbone.
It’s what lets us create all the different content types on the platform (sessions, sponsors, media partners, video rooms, the schedule, speaker panels) and control how they look on the front end.
Dave, our designer, joined us from a background designing for Disney and Hallmark. WordPress was new to him, but he took to Toolset quickly. As he put it:
“It was trial by fire, had to learn on the fly, but Toolset was one of the best experiences I had. Your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML are all in one spot. You don’t have to jump between Elementor or custom code or anything like that. Everything’s on one screen.”
Gravity Forms handles registration, login flows, and sponsor onboarding. Anytime you’re filling something out on the platform, that’s Gravity Forms.
WP Stream handles the video side.
We broadcast through StreamYard (what the speakers and hosts see), and that feeds into WP Stream (what attendees see inside WordPress).
Getting here wasn’t easy. Year one, every session was pre-recorded. Year two, we went live but used our own video servers and burned about $10,000 in bandwidth alone. Eventually Gabriel, the founder of WP Stream, became a sponsor and made the whole thing waaaaay more affordable.
Jitsi powers the virtual lounge where attendees can hop in and actually talk to each other face-to-face. Someone told us one year it was the closest thing to actually being at a WordCamp.
WP Discuz runs the live chat, so you can throw questions directly at the speakers in real time. This year we’ve got Eugene Levin from Semrush and Mary Hubbard from WordPress on stage, so maybe start thinking about what you want to ask them now.
3 Million Requests Per Day
We wanted the platform to feel like YouTube Live or Facebook Live, where comments are flying in real-time while you’re watching a session.
WP Discuz does this by checking for new comments every few seconds.
Sounds fine. Until you think about what happens when thousands of people are all watching sessions at the same time, and every single one of their browsers is asking the server “any new comments?” on a loop, every few seconds.
That adds up to about 3 million requests hitting the platform per day.
The first year we set this up, it was even worse. Every time someone opened a session, the platform loaded the entire comment history for that session.
So if people had left 4,000 comments, your browser was trying to load all 4,000 every time the page opened. Our friend Tom Fanelli over at Convesio (who we brought in to handle the summit’s infrastructure) caught it during testing and the fix was simple: show the newest comments first, and only load older ones if someone scrolls back. One change. Night and day difference. Whew!
On top of that, Vito wrote about 10,000 lines of custom styling to make the comment system actually look and feel like a real-time chat instead of a blog comment section. It’s a commenting plugin wearing a very convincing disguise.
The point for anyone running an agency: you can push WordPress plugins way beyond what they were originally designed to do.
You just need to test things properly so you catch the stuff that breaks when real traffic shows up.
Sponsor Booths
Every sponsor gets their own booth on the platform, and they can customize it themselves. They pick their brand colors, upload their logo, set up their content. No one from our team needs to touch it.
Dave designed the sponsor area in Figma, then brought it into WordPress using a combination of graphics and custom fields. Each sponsor’s brand colors get pulled in automatically, so the whole area feels cohesive but every booth looks different. If a sponsor doesn’t set their colors, their space just defaults to gray so nothing looks broken.
It feels like something that was custom-built for each sponsor. In reality, it’s one reusable template with a few smart customization options.
Load Testing
When a client’s website goes down for 15 minutes, it’s annoying but survivable. When your live event goes down mid-keynote with thousands of people watching, let’s just say everyone on the team is panicking.
There’s no “we’ll get to it tomorrow.“
Before every summit, Tom runs simulations where he throws a huge number of fake users at the platform to see what breaks.
This is trickier than testing a normal website because every summit attendee is logged in. Normal website tricks like caching (where the server saves a copy of the page so it doesn’t have to rebuild it every time) don’t really work here because every person’s experience is slightly different.
The tool Tom swears by is Robo Swarm (roboswarm.dev). It’s built specifically for testing WordPress sites under heavy load, and you don’t need to be super technical to set it up.
The 80/20 Thing
We didn’t build some custom application from scratch. We took WordPress, grabbed a handful of plugins, stripped out what we didn’t need, customized what we kept, and ended up with something that handles 5,000+ people at once.
Same approach works for client projects too. You don’t need to build everything from zero. Know which tools exist, know which ones are solid, and put your energy into the part that makes the final product feel like it was purpose-built.
That’s been the philosophy since 2020. It works.
Web Agency Summit 6 runs April 27-30. If you want to see this platform in action (and, you know, actually learn stuff that’ll help your agency), grab your ticket, it’s FREE!
HUGE shoutout to WP Stream for sponsoring this year’s summit again. After reading this post you can probably tell how much of the platform runs on their tech. Gabriel and his team have been with us for years now and we genuinely couldn’t do this without them. Thank you, seriously.
And a massive thank you to all our other sponsors making this year’s summit happen. We appreciate every single one of you.
