My site took 1.76 seconds per page. Nothing was broken — the code was just an ocean away from the database.
The site worked. Pages loaded, accounts worked, nothing errored. It just felt heavy — so I timed it. 1.76 seconds for a page that should take a quarter of that. My first instinct was that something in the code was slow. That instinct was completely wrong. The two halves of the site had ended up on different continents. The database, where the posts and accounts live, sits in Ireland, because that is where I put it. The servers running the site had been placed in Washington — by default, because that is what the hosting platform does when you do not say otherwise. Nobody chose that. I did not know there was a choice to make. So every page was crossing the Atlantic and back, several times over, because drawing one page means asking the database several separate questions. The fix was a three-line configuration file naming Dublin. Same code, same database, nothing rewritten. 1.76 seconds became about a quarter of a second. This is the part worth keeping: no amount of asking an AI to "make this page faster" would have found it, because nothing in the code was slow. Nothing ever appeared as an error. It looked like it was working — and it was, just badly, in a way that only shows up if you measure it.