Qafqazinfo.az — News Portal
Rebuilding a leading news portal without losing a single search ranking — full archive migration, preserved link structure, Redis caching, on-the-fly image optimisation and a mobile-first front end.
About the project
Qafqazinfo.az is one of Azerbaijan’s most-read news portals. At the time the site ran on PHP, and years of accumulated articles had earned it strong positions in Google. Our brief was to rebuild the site — without giving up any of that search traffic.
Migrating the archive
We wrote a parser that read the entire existing site. It walked the old pages and carried the articles, categories, publication dates and images across into the new database. Not a single article had to be re-entered by hand.
Protecting search traffic
The new site needed a different URL structure, so we built a redirect map that sent every old link (301) to its new address. As a result:
- Links already in Google’s index did not break
- Inbound links from other sites kept working
- Organic search traffic held up through the migration
Speed — Redis caching
On a news site the same page is requested thousands of times a minute. We cached rendered pages and the results of expensive queries in Redis. That took the load off the database and cut page load times dramatically.
Images — the heaviest thing on the page
On a news site it is not the text that makes a page heavy, it is the images. So we treated them as a piece of work in their own right.
First we fixed the folder structure. On the old site the images had effectively all been dropped into a single directory, and after years of publishing that directory held tens of thousands of files — which slows the file system down and makes backups and moves painful. In the new system images are filed into a dated folder hierarchy, so any one directory holds a manageable number of files.
Second, we optimised the images on the fly. An editor uploads a picture as it is, and at request time the system derives the size it actually needs, compresses it, and caches the result. Which means:
- Editors never have to crop and resize by hand
- A reader on a phone is not sent the full-size file meant for a desktop layout
- Each variant is generated once; every request after that is served from cache
On a mobile connection, that fed straight through into how fast the page appeared.
Mobile-first
The analytics were clear: most readers open the news on a phone. So we put the mobile browser experience first — the mobile page was designed and tuned before the desktop layout, not after it.
We no longer maintain the site, but the design we delivered and the software running behind it are still in use today.