The brief I walked into
The newsroom was punching above its weight on reporting but losing readers at the door. The legacy site loaded slowly, served the same heavy template to every page, and showed eight ads above the fold — making mobile reading miserable.
When a story went viral, the site would buckle under the traffic. Editors started avoiding linking to their own homepage on Facebook because the experience was hurting trust.
How I attacked it
I rebuilt the front end as a static-first architecture: every story renders as HTML at publish time, served from a CDN edge close to the reader. The CMS stayed exactly where it was — only the public surface changed. Ads moved from "stuffed in the header" to a single in-content unit that respects reading flow.
Category pages got infinite scroll without the usual JavaScript bloat, the search index was rebuilt for sub-100ms results, and the AMP version was retired in favour of a single fast canonical page.
What changed for the business
Largest Contentful Paint on a Dhaka 4G connection went from ~5 seconds to under 2. Pageviews per session jumped 62% — readers actually click into a second story now instead of leaving after the first. Bounce rate dropped almost in half on mobile, where the majority of traffic lives.
Ad revenue stayed flat despite halving the ad slots, because viewability and CPMs both went up.