Good Friday Appeal builds a modern donation experience

XWP rebuilt Good Friday Appeal’s legacy donation site on WP Engine, ready for its highest-traffic day of the year.

  • $17M+

    raised on Good Friday, at pre-pandemic levels

  • 145%

    increase in average session duration

Good Friday Appeal home page screen shot

Client ProfileOne of Australia’s most popular charities goes digital

Four smiling adults, two men and two women, stand in front of a large screen displaying '$25,268,485'
Client Site
goodfridayappeal.com.au (opens in a new tab)
Industry
Nonprofit
Products

Good Friday Appeal is a charity that raises money for the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, enabling it to provide world-class care to children and their families. The Appeal brings all sectors of the community together to raise funds throughout the year, culminating in an annual telethon on Good Friday, making the reliability and speed of its website critical to the charity’s mission.

  • The ChallengeOne day carries the whole year

    COVID-19 disrupted Good Friday Appeal’s traditional fundraising model, which relied on physical cash payments and a telethon phone bank. To bounce back from a 2020 downturn, they needed a digital-first strategy. They needed a donation platform that could reliably handle a massive single-day traffic spike. 

  • The SolutionA full rebuild for a high-stakes day

     XWP executed a full redesign, moving to a site optimized for mobile donations. They integrated BigCommerce and PayPal and embedded the live telethon directly into the mobile experience, allowing users to track donations in real time and build psychological connections. XWP also added an intuitive Gutenberg block editor for content creation. WP Engine’s infrastructure provided security and absorbed record-breaking traffic load.

ResultsBuilt to handle the biggest day of the year

Good Friday Appeal raised more than $17 million, returning to pre-pandemic donation levels. On the site, traffic nearly tripled during the busiest hour of the telethon (8pm Friday), with sessions up 91% and users up 81% year-over-year, and the platform recorded zero downtime throughout. 

  • 91%

    increase in sessions

  • 38%

    decrease in average page load time

Our team was able to fully focus on the design and development without having to worry about server configurations or security compliance. WP Engine covers all that.

Amit Sion Chief Revenue Officer, XWP

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