Building Sophisticated Architecture with HTTPS and Varnish

Wisebread, a financial publisher specializing in credit card reviews, has undergone a substantial evolution to its business model during the course of our long-term partnership. When morphing from blog content-driven ad revenue to multi-million dollar monthly ad spends to drive users to convert, the Wisebread team knew they needed to improve their site to be more secure, robust, and performant.

While navigating the complexities of legacy architecture, we transitioned the platform to be wholly served over HTTPS and integrated nearly 100 third-party libraries on a tight schedule in time for the important Google Chrome version 68 update that would label all sites without HTTPS as “insecure.”

Throughout the overhaul, we were able to isolate the most important handful of pages that drove most of the revenue, and using a Varnish caching system, ensured they had optimal uptime and performance. Even if the CMS or database went down, these revenue-generating pages would remain up. Naturally, we set up monitoring alerts in order to quickly respond to issues while seamlessly updating servers ensuring no downtime.

Even with various platform transitions wisebread.com touted a consistent 99.99% uptime ensuring the maximum impact of their ad investments, which is core to their revenue and business.