Case study Holiday park directory · UK
Caravan SiteFinder
Making a long-running UK holiday park directory faster, more secure and more resilient, with Cloudflare protection, bot filtering and a 30,000-image migration.
- Year
- 2025
- Built with
- Linux
- Apache
- MySQL
- Memcached
- iptables
- Cloudflare
- Cloudflare R2
- 3.05 → 0.19
- server load within 15 minutes, from a single caching rule during a traffic spike
- ~30,000
- images moved off legacy third-party hosting to storage the client owns
- Zero
- downtime moving DNS to Cloudflare, including email, Microsoft 365 and helpdesk records
Caravan SiteFinder has helped people find holiday and touring parks across the UK for almost 20 years. A site that has grown over that long builds up layers of older technology, and busy, well-known sites attract a lot of automated traffic. I took on its technical care to make it faster, more secure and more resilient, and to plan its next generation.
What I delivered
Performance tuning
I reviewed and cleaned up the database and caching layers, cleared years of built-up cache data, and moved key tables to a faster storage format. Page loads became quicker and server load dropped sharply.
Edge protection with Cloudflare
I moved the site's DNS to Cloudflare, including its email, Microsoft 365 and helpdesk records, with no downtime. The server now only accepts traffic routed through Cloudflare, behind firewall rules and smart caching. During one traffic spike, a single caching rule took server load from 3.05 to 0.19 within 15 minutes.
Bot management
I identified the automated crawlers working through the site's search pages and filtered them out at the network edge, so the server's capacity goes to real visitors.
Network-level resilience
I hardened the server firewall and set up protection that holds up under heavy traffic.
Image library migration
I moved around 30,000 images from legacy third-party hosting to Cloudflare storage the client owns and controls, which removed an outside dependency.
Clear reporting
I wrote plain-English reports for the owners, so they always knew what had changed and why.
Roadmap
I produced a technical assessment and a phased plan for a modern rebuild of the platform.
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