Why we had bad site performance these last days

On thursday our site became slower by the minute. To help solve this we installed some extra cache plug-ins to help load the site faster for returning visitors. However, this sort of backfired. On friday the site was completely offline. Since our redesign we also host our website in the Azure cloud. Some research showed that other Wordpress sites on Azure also had the same problems that we had. This led us to believe that maybe there was something wrong with Azure. This was not the case. Turned out the new cache plug-ins were responsible for the bad performance. What we’ve discovered is that after restarting the website, it loads once. After that it just hangs. With the help of our colleagues Clemens Reijnen and Patriek van Dorp we were eventually able to fix the problem. We were back online yesterday, but did not wanted to scream it from the rooftops yet. Just in case. We are very sorry for the inconvenience to our readers. Today, we will make it up to you; we got some great blogposts and video’s coming up.