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Harvest Christian Fellowship scales its digital ministry
Harvest Christian Fellowship’s WP Engine platform stayed online as livestream viewership grew week over week from 50,000 to 1.3 million.
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1.3M
livestream viewers, Palm Sunday 2020
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11K+
responded to the Gospel that day
Client ProfileA ministry built to reach the multitudes
- Client Site
- harvest.org (opens in a new tab)
- Industry
- Events
- Products
Pastor Greg Laurie’s 1973 home Bible study of 30 people grew into America’s eighth-largest church, now reaching people around the world.
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The ChallengeOutgrowing in-house tech
Harvest had run its own website and webcasting infrastructure since the late 1990s, but had undershot its own growth potential — the in-house setup couldn’t scale to what the ministry needed.
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The SolutionAn enterprise platform, built to scale
After evaluating a rebuild in 2018, Harvest moved to WP Engine’s Enterprise Plan, with dedicated AWS infrastructure, active-active reliability, and 24/7 expert support.
The resultReady when the world was watching
Before the pandemic, Sunday morning livestream attendance was around 50,000 per session. As people could not attend church services in person, livestream audience grew to 230,000, then 360,000, then 625,000 across successive broadcasts. When a presidential tweet drew national attention to Harvest’s Palm Sunday broadcast in 2020, viewership escalated to 1.3 million — all without the platform going down.
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99.99%
platform uptime through the surge
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50K
typical livestream viewers before the pandemic pivot
Being able to ensure we’re scaling at the rate we need has been a breath of fresh air.
Director of Marketing and Communications, Harvest Christian Fellowship
