Scalable ecommerce site is a hole-in-one for golf association.

With 800+ member clubs and 335,000+ individual members, the Florida State Golf Association (FSGA) is responsible for more than 550 tournament days each year, which ranks in the Top 3 among all state-run golf associations in the United States.

The FSGA partnered with Spinutech to upgrade their website to a vendor-supported platform that would provide a better user experience for their members.

The previous FSGA website was built on a custom .NET platform from 12 years prior that was no longer going to be supported by Microsoft. They needed to upgrade to a platform that would allow them to leverage modern technology. The primary function of the FSGA website is to manage golf tournament sign-ups, so their next platform would also need to enable their site to handle significant web traffic and process payments safely, securely, and efficiently. Additionally, the number of users accessing the FSGA site on their mobile devices has grown significantly over the past few years. The new website needed to provide an excellent mobile experience.

Our recommendation was to build their new website on the nopCommerce platform, a customizable ecommerce platform that runs on the last version of Microsoft .NET. Not only would nopCommerce come equipped with the payment-processing system the FSGA needs to support their website’s transactions, but it would also provide the level of security that is essential to their operations. Our team then performed a code audit of their previous website to understand the scale of the project and allocate our resources effectively and efficiently.

The new site would integrate with Google Places and Google Address Verification. Google Places would help improve address quality by auto-completing street addresses for users signing up for a tournament for the first time. Google Address Verification would improve the checkout process, ensuring the user’s billing information matches their credit card.

Finally, their new website would be mobile responsive, better serving their mobile users.

The new FSGA website built on nopCommerce is much better equipped to handle the surge of site traffic on tournament sign-up days and the volume of transactions that follow. On their biggest tournament sign-up day of the year, the website processed 849 transactions in the first five minutes, 1,300 in the first ten minutes, and 2,500 in the first three hours. More recently, the platform set new all-time performance records, processing 3,673 transactions during the peak 8–11 a.m. window and reaching a peak rate of 252 payments per minute during prime sign-up activity.

The infrastructure supporting the site has also proven highly scalable under heavy demand. During the latest sign-up surge, the system handled over 5,300 peak web page requests and more than 53,000 image requests through the CDN, while web servers operated at only around 5% capacity and the database averaged 45% CPU utilization, indicating ample headroom for future growth.

Mobile user experience is greatly improved now that the website is mobile responsive. 40% of site traffic is on mobile, allowing members to more easily access golf scores and standings.