01 · Inherited a platform under pressure
This wasn't a redesign. When I joined in November 2023 as Senior Developer, FMT was a live newsroom losing ground. An earlier migration had left the platform brittle, and the numbers showed it: traffic and visibility were sliding, pages were slow, and sections of the site went missing exactly when traffic spiked. I was promoted to Head of IT in November 2024.
The hard part of inheriting a system like this is that the symptoms are business symptoms — declining reach, weaker ad performance, frustrated editors — but the causes are technical and tangled together. My job was to own the platform layer and make the whole stack work as one system again, using staged cutovers and rollback paths while the newsroom stayed live.
02 · What was actually broken
The problem was never one bug. The earlier migration had shipped without the SEO foundations a news platform lives on — structured data and JSON-LD, proper metadata, clean URL behavior, and Core Web Vitals that were nowhere near green.
Underneath that, the CMS was being throttled by the database: slow queries, missing indexes, connection limits and memory/CPU pressure that pushed load consistently around 50% and often to 100% during spikes. When the database choked, page sections simply didn't render. On a breaking-news day, that's the worst possible failure mode.
03 · What I changed
It was a lean core — I was the only senior in-house engineer, with no dedicated QA function; verification fell to automation and review discipline. The major platform launches landed as FMT V3 in March 2024 and V4 in April 2025. I set the Next.js platform direction and rebuilt the rendering and caching model around it — ISR for news content, with custom caching designed to work with Cloudflare rather than fight it. I repaired the SEO layer from the ground up: metadata, structured data, schema and URL behavior, so the platform could be indexed and surfaced properly again.
On the data side, I refactored queries, re-indexed, and added a custom cache compatible with both Next.js and Cloudflare. On the edge, I hardened security with Cloudflare firewall upgrades, bot management, audits and patches. And throughout, I pushed FMT toward independence — building in-house tools and migrating services to self-managed platforms to reduce external dependency.
04 · What changed (results)
The platform moved from a declining narrative to a growth one: supporting 8.5M monthly active users and 22M+ annual readers, with organic share of traffic growing from 40% to 68%, Lifestyle page views up 184%, recirculation from ~1% to 20%+, and load time improving from 4.2s to 1.3s. Database load came down from the 50–100% danger zone to around 30%, with only rare spikes toward 40%.
Visibility recovered alongside it — the platform reached Google News publisher status and subscriber channels grew off a near-zero base. The cloud bill came down from RM45–60K a month to RM12–15K — RM400K+ a year back in the budget — by making the platform talk to the database less and the cache more.
05 · Why it matters
This is the clearest evidence I have of hands-on technology leadership: diagnosis, architecture, engineering, database cleanup, edge strategy, security hardening, vendor reduction — and enough rollout judgment to keep a live business running through all of it.
And it's not just a media story. Any operator — a publisher, a marketplace, a bank, a logistics platform — recognizes the shape: you inherit a system under pressure, find the technical causes behind the business symptoms, make SEO, cache, database, frontend, CDN and security work together, reduce dependency, and deliver change through controlled production cutovers.