When the average person thinks about election night, their focus is who’s on the ballot and who they want to win.
When the newsrooms and IT teams who run the coverage think about election night, their focus is plainly: we can’t mess this up.
Election night in the U.S., and the days and weeks leading up to it, is a hectic time for everyone.
Election offices are counting ballots and pushing out results as fast as they can. Newsrooms are tracking down updates and scrambling to put out coverage. And IT teams are preparing for huge waves of traffic to hit their websites, and monitoring performance throughout to make sure nothing crashes.
No normal Tuesday can prepare you for the challenges of peak election day traffic. Once every two years, your biggest and most important audience is watching, and if something goes wrong, the story becomes about the outage instead of the election.
At WordPress VIP, our focus on election day is making sure our clients are fully prepared and their websites stay as secure and performant as any other day. This year was no different.
During the days surrounding this year’s midterms, WordPress VIP’s platform served 25.3 billion requests and maintained 100% uptime across all of our clients’ websites.
Now that the dust of the midterm coverage is settling, let’s take a deeper look at the traffic patterns from this year’s election coverage, how we made sure our clients’ websites were prepared, and why this Tuesday went as smoothly as any other day.
25.3 billion requests, and nobody noticed
Midterm election night
requests served, Nov 2–4
A 15% increase on the 22B requests we served
across the 2024 election days.
requests per minute at peak
Peak traffic on election night 2026, a 29% increase
on the 6.8M requests per minute average.
customer site uptime
Our customer sites stayed up throughout.
large DDoS attacks absorbed automatically
No impact to customer sites.
Sources: WordPress VIP edge traffic and Parse.ly publisher network
This year’s election drew even more traffic to our clients’ sites than the presidential election in 2024 did, but our customers weathered it without missing a beat.
From November 2-4, WordPress VIP served 25.3 billion requests, a 15% increase from the 22 billion served during the 2024 presidential election. And across Parse.ly’s publisher network, reading peaked at 2.54x a normal Tuesday, nearly 80% above what Parse.ly’s own model built from the 2018 and 2022 midterms predicted.
Traffic was flat until early evening, when a sharp climb started around 6–7PM ET, and then a peak arose around 11PM as races were called. At that peak, WordPress VIP served 9.46M requests/minute, a 29% increase from the average (6.8M requests/minute) across our network of sites.
Total edge requests per minute
All sites, from the morning before Election Day through election night.
Requests per minute started near 5.8M on the morning of Nov 2, rose to about 7M by 4 PM, then fell overnight to a low of about 3.6M around 3:40 AM on Nov 3. They climbed back to about 6.8M by midday on Nov 3 and surged on election night, peaking at 9.46M requests per minute at 10:34 PM EST, before easing to about 6.3M by midnight.
All times in EST (UTC−5). Source: WordPress VIP edge traffic.
Throughout election night, we saw two large DDoS attacks on customer websites (a volumetric attack at 8:06PM and a layer-7 attack at 10:44PM), one peaking at over 200 gigabits per second, and they were absorbed by our platform automatically, with no impact to customer sites.
Even through all of this, all WordPress VIP customers’ sites achieved 100% uptime during the days surrounding election night.
Where the traffic came from
Looking deeper at aggregate data from Parse.ly’s publisher network, we uncovered some outlying referral patterns that illustrate how election night poses challenges unlike any other night. Knowing that going in is exactly why WordPress VIP was ready for it.
On a normal weeknight during the same hours, publishers’ own apps tend to get about 50% of all views. But on election night, of the 359 million views that came during peak traffic hours, 74% happened on the publishers’ websites, with only 20% on their own apps. What’s interesting here is that people don’t open up an app to find out who won, they search.
It’s a useful reminder that the website hasn’t been replaced by apps, at least not for moments like this one. Apps win on habit and loyalty. The browser wins the instant something unpredictable happens and someone needs an answer right now.
Now, looking at the election coverage views that ended up on publisher websites, here’s a breakdown of the sources that brought readers there:
How views arrived
Referral sources breakdown over full election night period
- Search46%
Google alone sent 95% of search visits, about 63 million views.
- Direct42%
Typed, bookmarked, no referrer.
- Aggregators7%
Google Discover and Google News together sent about 8 million.
- Social3%
Facebook was about three quarters of that, at 2.8 million.
- Other2%
- AI assistants<0.01%
About 10,000 views.
In search, Google alone sent 95% of search visits, about 63 million views. Within aggregators, Google Discover and Google News together sent about 8 million views. And in social, Facebook was about three quarters of that, at 2.8 million views.
What we see overall is a fairly common distribution of referral sources, but what’s most interesting is how these referral sources shifted throughout the election coverage period.
Overnight, during the vote-count window (3PM November 3–7AM November 4), the distribution was fairly consistent with the averages. The majority of traffic arrived at election coverage mostly through “active” channels, a classic breaking-news pattern, driven by people searching for results as they came in.
- Search: 51%
- Direct: 30%
- Apple News: 9%
- App: 7%
- Aggregator: 3%
*This breakdown reflects the views that originated outside of publishers’ websites.
But by the next morning (11AM–12PM November 4), as the stories moved from breaking to catch-up reading, that distribution flipped, with more passive/algorithmic channels increasing their share significantly.
- Direct: 42%
- App: 19%
- Search: 18%
- Apple News: 13%
- Aggregator: 6%
- Social: 2%
*This breakdown reflects the views that originated outside of publishers’ websites.
For a full exploration of the patterns we saw in traffic and referral sources, read Parse.ly’s election night update. And for even more insights on what readers were paying attention to, including breakdowns by election race, candidate, and state, check out Parse.ly’s full election night dashboard.
Each of these referral channels impacts a site differently. Search traffic lands on pages a cache has never seen before, pulling fresh content straight from the application. Direct and app traffic tends to hit the same few pages over and over, from readers refreshing for updates.
A platform built for one pattern and not the other will fail on a night like this one, when both patterns arrive within hours of each other. With all of the measures WordPress VIP takes to prepare our infrastructure and clients’ teams for high-stakes, high-traffic events, we were ready for all of it.
How WordPress VIP prepares for nights like these
Our team doesn’t wait for election night to start scaling. It’s a coordinated effort across all teams at WordPress VIP. We start preparation early, hardening our infrastructure weeks in advance. And we provide high-traffic event services to help customers optimize ahead of time.
We perform a historical review of how sites have performed in the past to prioritize support distribution. And we prepare patches and hotfixes for pain points in application code to roll out if needed.
We bolster our staff and create internal “situation rooms” where we start running proactive reviews of sites in the hours leading up to the event, opening proactive tickets should we find any issues.
And on election night, our team’s attention is squarely on election night websites.
We treat the event like a code yellow, with constant monitoring, and engineers on standby. The moment something happens, we’re ready to jump in. And while the platform scales for high traffic automatically, we add extra scale proactively if needed.
As part of our monitoring before these kinds of events, capacity on election night was raised hours before the first polls closed, based on what our sites were already signaling. The platform was already sized up before the traffic arrived rather than catching up to it in real time.
We do all of this so that by the time the first polls close, there’s nothing left to figure out, and you can just execute.
This is the infrastructure nobody’s supposed to notice
If this sounds like a familiar story, it’s because we’ve been here before. Election night 2026 beat 2024’s numbers, but it wasn’t the first time our customers have gone through their heaviest nights and come out unscathed.
Back in 2020, on FiveThirtyEight’s zero-downtime election night, the site served 132,000 requests a second, and our server response time stayed flat at 133 milliseconds the whole time. Over the full election week, it served close to 1.3 billion pageviews, a new record for the site.
Elections aren’t the only nights we see like this either. ADWEEK’s Super Bowl coverage usually brings in 3 to 6x their normal traffic. A year after their old CMS fumbled in 2024, the site stayed up 100% of the time on WordPress VIP during the 2025 Super Bowl.
When Queen Elizabeth II died, Al Jazeera saw double their usual traffic with no issues, and News Corp Australia’s average request time held at 0.314 seconds through a 15% jump. And TIME handled more than 100,000 requests a second when it named Taylor Swift Person of the Year.
Every year, reader habits change, and people find and consume the news in more places and ways than ever. Your success in delivering that news depends on the foundation underneath your content. When the foundation does its job, nobody thinks about it, and that’s how it should be.
Every publisher eventually gets a night like this: an election, a Super Bowl, or even a story nobody saw coming. WordPress VIP treats every one of them the same way: like it’s our own site on the line, prepared well before it matters. Not just staying up for the biggest night of the year, but making sure nobody ever has to wonder if your website will.
When the next traffic spike hits, will your platform hold or buckle? See how WordPress VIP keeps the biggest nights online.
