60% faster page loads, zero downtime during 3x traffic spikes
Media / Publishing
4 weeks
Performance Optimization, Infrastructure Management, DevOps
Website crashing under traffic spikes, slow page loads, growing technical debt
60% faster page loads, zero downtime during 3x traffic spikes
A prominent online news outlet serving 50,000+ daily unique visitors was drowning in technical debt. What started as a fast, responsive website had gradually deteriorated as their content library grew to over 100,000 articles spanning several years of daily publishing.
Page load times exceeded 8 seconds during peak hours (morning news cycle, 8–10 AM), causing a 35% bounce rate increase. Server crashes during breaking news events — when a major story broke, traffic would spike 3–5x within minutes. The server would buckle, returning 502/503 errors to readers exactly when they needed the site most.
Years of accumulated content, revisions, user comments, and analytics data had ballooned the database to 45GB. Queries that once took milliseconds now took 5–10 seconds.
Every page request hit the application server and database directly — even for articles published years ago that hadn't changed in months.
Static assets (images, CSS, JS) were being served from the origin server in Moldova, adding 200–400ms of latency for readers in Western Europe and the USA.
Journalists reported that the CMS backend had become "unusably slow," with article save operations taking 15–30 seconds and occasionally timing out — causing lost drafts and missed deadlines. The publication's editor-in-chief described the situation: "We're a news site that can't handle the news. Every time something important happens, we go dark."
Optimum Web conducted a comprehensive performance audit and implemented a multi-layered optimization strategy:
Performance isn't a one-time fix — it's an architecture. For high-traffic content sites, the combination of intelligent caching (Redis), CDN optimization, and database tuning can reduce server load by 85%+ while simultaneously improving user experience. The ROI is immediate: lower bounce rates, higher engagement, and the confidence that your site won't crash when it matters most.
A SaaS startup's CI/CD pipeline was frozen for 5 days due to M1/x86 architecture mismatch. We diagnosed and resolved the issue in 48 hours, then overhauled the entire pipeline for future-proof multi-arch builds.
An e-commerce platform discovered 6 months of silently failing backups during a critical database corruption. We rescued 85% of the data, then implemented a multi-tier backup system with automated weekly verification that proved itself during a real hardware failure.
Every project is unique, but the problems often aren't. If this case study resonated with your situation, let's discuss how we can help.
