Cutting Se og Hør's load time from 15 seconds to 2

Context

Aller Media runs some of Denmark's most-read media brands: Se og Hør, Femina, Billedbladet, and more. The sites ran on a legacy Drupal install while the organization moved toward Laravel-based services. These were high-traffic sites where slow pages cost readers and ad revenue.

My role

Senior Web Developer across 10+ brand sites. I worked across the whole stack: AWS infrastructure, backend services, and frontend.

What we did

Se og Hør took around 15 seconds to load. The obvious answer was a rebuild on a modern stack, but the rebuild was years away and readers were leaving now. So we fixed it inside the legacy install instead. We re-architected how content and ads were handled and modernized image delivery.

I also built CMS tools for the editors. Less visible than the performance work, but editors across several brands used them every day.

Outcome

Load times went from 15 seconds to 2. The sites kept publishing through the whole migration toward Laravel services, and editors got faster tools to work with.

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If you have a legacy platform that "just needs to survive until the rewrite," there's usually more life in it than you think. See how I work or get in touch.