The popular movie release group YTS, also known as YIFY, has released a major overhaul of its site. In order to keep up with millions of pageviews per day the site's backend has been completely redone. In addition, the site has a new look, a new API, and several new features.

Operated by the popular ‘YIFY’ release group, YTS has become one of the most popular pirate brands releasing several top movies on a weekly basis.

The group releases its movies on various popular torrent sites, but in recent years its home base YTS.re has also gathered a steady user base.

“We are currently looking at around 6.5 million pages views with just under a million unique users coming daily to the site,” the YTS team informs TF, adding that it’s roughly a 33 percent increase in uniques compared to last year.

Since the old site wasn’t built to serve millions of page views per day it started to fail more often, causing all sorts of problems. Several improvements were needed to keep things running smoothly, and in recent weeks YTS worked hard to put these in place.

Over the past weekend YTS was ready to roll out a major overhaul of the site. The backend was completely redone and the site got a redesign as well.

“We didn’t really decide to make these changes, we were kind of forced to. In the past half a year the old site was failing us. It started to crash and die with all sorts of errors on a regular basis,” YTS tells us.

While YTS was working on the backend they also decided to give the site a new look and roll out some frequently requested features. The movie pages were improved with new info and list both 720p and 1080p versions on the same page, for example.

Another big change is the responsive design, which makes the site more easily accessible across various devices, including smartphones.

“We are finally embracing the future. We have added a responsive layout for our mobile users making life a little easier when it comes to surfing the website from your smartphone,” YTS notes.

Finally, the site’s API has also been upgraded and should be more simple to use now. This means that the developers of various Popcorn Time forks and other apps that rely on YTS will have to do some upgrades as well.

The growth of YTS hasn’t gone unnoticed by Hollywood either. A few months ago the MPAA reported YTS to the U.S. Government in its overview of notorious markets, describing it as one of the most popular release groups.

“[Yts.re] facilitates the downloading of free copies of popular movies, and currently lists more than 5,000 high-quality movie torrents available to download for free,” MPAA wrote.

Needless to say, the movie industry group will be less excited with YTS’ continued expansion.