Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation protects intellectual property while expanding access to poetic works

The Poetry Foundation hosts a web archive of over 47,000 English language poems and publishes Poetry Magazine, which has been in print since 1912. The foundation makes an effort to reproduce poets’ work as accurately as possible, including audio and video elements plus biographical information about the poets and their past performances.

The Poetry Foundation stands out from familiar sites in their notable protection of the poetry community’s intellectual property. Poems in the foundation’s archive are properly attributed, and their rightsholders are compensated for the right to reproduce their work. The Poetry Foundation also provides grants to literary arts organizations and is one of the largest private funders of the literary arts in the U.S.

Modernizing the website and enhancing performance

When the Poetry Foundation was first establishing a web presence, the organization created a fully custom tech stack, including their own content management system (CMS). This customized environment allowed the platform to be highly tailored to the types of content that the organization hosts. But the site didn’t perform as well as under load as it might have with off-the-shelf, optimized solutions. The Poetry Foundation first engaged with Cloudflare as part of an effort to modernize the organization’s tech stack and transition away from the custom solution. Many details of the eventual tech stack were still undefined, but, based on a recommendation from the foundation’s technology partner Happy Cog, the Poetry Foundation selected the Cloudflare web application firewall (WAF) and Cloudflare’s image resizing capabilities.

Streamlining website management with Cloudflare Pages

While the Poetry Foundation selected Cloudflare for the WAF, the team rapidly realized that Cloudflare also offered solutions for some of their other challenges as well. The plan was to use a headless CMS to manage the foundation’s web content, but they needed a system to host frontend pages. According to Matt Weinberg, President of Technology at Happy Cog, “It quickly became obvious that using Cloudflare Pages for the frontend would make the site cheaper to host, easier to maintain, and faster to set up.”

The Poetry Foundation’s website takes advantage of multiple features built into Cloudflare Pages, including support for Next.js and integration with GitHub. In Cloudflare Pages, merging a GitHub branch with an update into main provides a page preview, allowing the team to check for any errors or other issues before launch. Deployment of approved pages is automated using Cloudflare Wrangler, and an integration with the project’s backend CMS enables automated cache management.

The ability to automate build and deployment processes means that managing the foundation’s web presence now requires only minimal time and effort. “Cloudflare enables us to focus on the author and user experience,” says Erin Watson, product manager at Poetry Foundation. “We can work to ensure that content produced for the site is the best that it can be and that people have the opportunity to engage with poetry in a new and different way.”

Improving SEO rankings with better page performance

Fast page load speeds are a critical component of the Poetry Foundation’s mission. “Page performance is important because we want to be seen as a reputable, canonical resource for poetry,” says Watson. “If someone is learning about poetry, we’d like them to learn from a source whose mission is based on celebrating poets and amplifying poetry.”

To continue their mission of supporting poets, the Poetry Foundation needs to rank highly when someone searches for a poem on the web. Page load speed is one of the main criteria that Google and other search engines use to score pages. The Poetry Foundation uses Cloudflare to optimize image loading times and minimize latency for their global user base.

Protecting poets’ work by defending against bots with Cloudflare

Malicious bots are also a significant concern for the Poetry Foundation. Scraping bots attempt to copy poems to host on other sites that don’t offer compensation to their authors. “We’re very concerned about exposing the work entrusted to us to bots and AI,” says Watson, “so we’re grateful for Cloudflare’s ability to block scrapers.”

The foundation’s site also faces thousands of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks every day designed to waste resources or knock the site offline.

With the Cloudflare Business Plan, the Poetry Foundation gets built-in protection against DDoS attacks as well as known bots.