Bota Sot is a leading Albanian-language news publication. The job was speed.
Slow news sites lose twice. Readers leave before the article paints, and search engines notice that readers leave. Nobody writes in to complain about load time. They just stop coming back, which is a much harder problem to see.
The work was hands-on and unromantic. Cut what the page loads before it can show anything. Fix the layout shifts that make you tap the wrong thing while an ad drops in above your thumb. Get the mobile experience genuinely responsive rather than technically responsive, because most readers arrive on a phone, often on a connection that punishes every extra request.
I worked at the template and component level, where the problems actually live. A one-off fix to a single page is a demo. Fix the article template and every article published afterward inherits it.
Core Web Vitals improved, and so did the two things that matter more: the experience of reading the site, and its standing in search.