AfricaForPress

The problem

AfricaForPress is a trilingual (Arabic, English, French) news platform, and it was struggling on several fronts at once. Article pages were slow because the API returned 3–5 MB of data for a single article: entity relationships were being serialized without limits. The infrastructure was fragile. SSL certificates had expired, Docker healthchecks were failing, and deployments relied on direct SSH access that exposed the server. The site was also missing the technical SEO that a news publisher needs to be found, and its AdSense monetization had been suspended for missing compliance requirements.

The solution

I worked across the full stack to fix the platform from the ground up. On the backend, I reworked the Spring Boot data layer to remove unbounded @OneToMany serialization, added paginated category and tag endpoints, and built a lightweight sitemap endpoint. On the frontend, I refactored key Next.js components and implemented complete technical SEO: dynamic sitemaps, robots rules, an RSS feed, JSON-LD NewsArticle structured data and OpenGraph metadata. For infrastructure, I moved server access behind a Cloudflare Tunnel with fail2ban, replaced the expired certificates with a wildcard Cloudflare Origin Certificate, and rebuilt the CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions to deploy through cloudflared with service tokens. I also fixed the Docker healthcheck and translation-service issues. Finally, I restored AdSense compliance with ads.txt and GDPR consent management, and extended the platform’s reach with an iOS app.

The result

Single-article API responses dropped from 3–5 MB to about 6.5 KB, a reduction of over 99%, which made pages load much faster. The server no longer exposes SSH to the internet, and deployments run through a secure pipeline. The site now has publisher-grade SEO, AdSense monetization is back online, the Google News application is underway, and AfricaForPress is live on the App Store.