An SSL deployment that quietly halved the site’s speed
The problem
Load times degraded sharply and the change coincided with an SSL deployment. Nobody could point to the specific cause, and the site was the company's main channel for an education audience.
What was happening
An education robotics company in Denmark had watched its site get materially slower, and the slowdown lined up with an SSL deployment. That correlation was suspected but not proven, and without proof nobody wanted to touch a certificate configuration on a live site.
The work
The deployment was examined end to end rather than reverted on a hunch: certificate chain, handshake behaviour, redirect path and how the change had propagated through the rest of the stack. Once the mechanism was identified, the fix was specific and reversible.
With the site healthy, the engagement continued into feature work: landing pages for campaigns, and the custom post type architecture behind their online academy so their own team could publish course content without a developer.
Why it is here
This is the common shape of a performance job. The cause was a change somebody made for a good reason, with a consequence nobody predicted, and finding it took measurement rather than opinion.
The outcome
The regression was traced to the certificate deployment and resolved. The same engagement extended into building landing pages and the custom post type structure behind their online academy.