<b>The recipe blog that never showed a slow page again</b>

<b>The recipe blog that never showed a slow page again</b>

A recipe site in Portland did 220k pageviews a day, and the pain was the long tail: 40,000 older recipes that each got hit a few times an hour. Too cold to stay cached, too popular to ignore. Every expiry meant a 600 ms origin trip while a reader stared at a spinner.

We swapped hard TTLs for stale-while-revalidate. The edge served the slightly stale page instantly, then refreshed it in the background. Readers never waited on a revalidation again.

Median page load for cold-tail recipes dropped 610 ms to 45 ms. Origin saw the same number of refreshes, but none of them blocked a human. Bounce rate on older URLs fell 22%.

The number that mattered: 0 readers now wait on a cache refresh.