A server problem, not a cosmetic one
Response time was the same on slow mobile and on fibre, so the problem was the server.
CASE STUDY · 2026
A WordPress news portal
60x faster, with zero rankings lost.
A sports newsroom serving 7.3 million requests a month on a server that took 3.4 seconds to answer. We found the real bottleneck, rebuilt the caching around it, moved the whole thing to AWS, and came out the other side with more search traffic than we went in with.
60x
Faster response
31x
Requests served
0.022s
95th percentile
+7%
Search clicks after the move
- Client
- Unánimo Deportes
- Industry
- Media / News
- Year
- 2026
THE CHALLENGE
It was the origin, not the reader.
The server took about 3.4 seconds to answer before a single pixel reached anyone.
Unánimo Deportes is a sports news portal for US Latinos, run as a live newsroom with a wire importer that never stops. It served 7.3 million requests and 135 GB a month from origin, over 16,000 articles, and Google had flagged its Core Web Vitals as failing.
A newsroom cannot be frozen
Every change had to coexist with editors publishing and the wire importer running.
Every post invalidates the cache
Caching had to survive publishing all day, not assume a static site.
THE SOLUTION
Measure first, then move.
We measured the site in lab and field conditions until the cause was isolated, including testing a widely held belief, that a diagnostic plugin was slowing readers down, and showing with data that it was not.
Caching that matches the actual server
The site was running a caching system that could not work with the server hosting it. We replaced that layer with one that serves static HTML without executing code on every visit.
- The technical crux Everything else followed from getting this one layer right.
- Measured after the change Both configurations were run on the same hardware under the same concurrent load.
- Primed before the visit Publishing an article regenerates the front page and the sections in the background, so nobody lands on a cold one. Validated across five real importer cycles.
A migration with a safety net
Core, plugins, theme, database and media replicated into a controlled AWS environment without touching production at any point. The old host cut off large exports, so the 7.3 GB database traveled in verifiable, resumable ranges.
- Judgement over brute force Of 155 GB of accumulated files only the 1.2 GB actually in use traveled; the rest already lived in cloud storage the site keeps using.
- Production untouched The original site stayed intact as the fallback until the cutover, which ran on 7 September.
- The rankings came with it Search clicks averaged 845 a day in the fortnight before the move and 906 in the week after, with average position moving from 7.35 to 7.25.
Then the work the old server made impossible
On hardware we control, the backlog that had been unreachable on shared hosting became routine. Image weight, the metadata Google reads, the live scoreboard and the way articles link into the statistics section were all worked in turn, each measured before and after.
- 79% off the images that matter The hero image of every recent article converted to WebP: 1,183 files, 356 MB down to 73 MB.
- 112 sections that now say what they are Thirteen of the 112 category pages had a meta title and fourteen had a description. All 112 have both, written one by one.
- The scoreboard, four times sooner The ticker the client calls its highest-traffic product used to get its source at 11 seconds. It now starts at 2.4.
Rules the newsroom can write to
The last piece was not code. We read three months of the site’s own search data and turned it into a short set of titling and structure rules the desk can apply to what it publishes every day, each one argued from the site’s own numbers.
- Out of their own numbers Every rule is shown against real articles of theirs, with the title as published and the title we would have written.
- Inside the routine they already have The recommendations fit what the desk does today instead of asking for a new process.
A LOOK AT THE WORK
EXPLORE
THE MISSION.
STACK & TOOLS
WHAT IT IS
BUILT ON.
Only what this project actually runs on.
LET'S TALK ABOUT YOURS
THE RESULTS
It moved house without losing its place.
The hard part was never the speed itself, it was holding it in a site that publishes all day. With the cache purging and regenerating continuously, 95% of visits are still served in under 22 milliseconds. The migration ran on 7 September and search traffic did not dip: the day of the cutover is the only one below average, and the next day was already above where the site had been. Since then the same two-core instance has been absorbing around 270,000 requests a day while we work on what the old host never allowed.
- 107,950 entries migrated and verified
- 155 GB of archive handled without copying
- News-wire importer validated live
- Cutover with instant rollback ready
- 1,183 images to WebP, 356 to 73 MB
- Meta tags for all 112 categories
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