The challenge
El Faro was running on a slow, fragile monolithic WordPress: every image bloated the server, traffic spikes from big stories took the site down, and performance hurt both readers and Google rankings.
The solution
We turned it into a headless newspaper: WordPress remains the newsroom tool while a modern Next.js frontend serves the site, kept in sync instantly through signed webhooks and an automatic reconciliation process. Images now live on Amazon S3 behind CloudFront, and a layered cache with selective purging keeps every front page and article fresh the second it's published.
The outcome
The site flies and, above all, never goes down: if WordPress fails, the system keeps serving the full newspaper from its backup copies for days. Traffic spikes stopped being a problem and the newsroom publishes exactly as it always did.