Making a newsroom fast without making it expensive

The problem

A monolithic WordPress site was serving a high-traffic news audience. Pages were slow to first byte, and every traffic spike landed on the same server that editors used to publish.

What I did

1. WordPress becomes a headless CMS behind GraphQL; SvelteKit renders the reader-facing site.
2. Incremental Static Regeneration regenerates only the pages that change.
3. Edge caching absorbs reads so the origin mostly handles publishing.
4. Redis for caching, Meilisearch for search, Garage for self-hosted S3 media storage.

What changed

• Substantially lower TTFB and faster page loads.
• Publishing and reading traffic no longer compete for the same resources.