Lawyerly
Engineering Reliability for Legal News Platform
Summary
Transformed an unreliable legal news platform into a robust, high-performance system. Achieved +109% organic traffic growth by fixing downtime issues, improving page speed, and implementing proper monitoring.
The Challenge
Lawyerly, a legal news platform, faced frequent downtime and slow load times. Readers were frustrated. Editorial team couldn't publish reliably. The platform was losing credibility and traffic due to technical unreliability.
My Approach
- Conducted infrastructure audit to identify reliability issues
- Found problems: inadequate hosting, no caching, inefficient database queries
- Prioritized fixes: eliminate downtime first, then optimize speed
- Implemented monitoring and alerting systems
- Created runbooks for common issues to empower editorial team
The Solution
Rebuilt infrastructure for reliability: (1) Hosting upgrade - migrated to enterprise-grade hosting with 99.9% uptime SLA, (2) Performance optimization - implemented Redis caching, optimized database queries, CDN for media, (3) Monitoring - set up uptime monitoring, performance tracking, automated alerts, (4) Scalability - prepared infrastructure to handle traffic spikes during breaking news.
Measurable Impact
From frequent outages to near-perfect reliability
More readers as site became reliable and fast
Faster experience improved engagement and SEO
Editorial team regained confidence in platform reliability
Key Takeaways
Reliability is a feature. For a news platform, uptime directly impacts credibility and traffic.
Performance and SEO are connected. Faster sites rank better and retain more readers.
Monitoring enables proactive fixes. Catching issues before users report them maintains trust.
Empower non-technical teams with runbooks and clear escalation paths.