News & media
Publishing at volume is an engineering job
A newsroom pushing forty stories a day puts pressure on a website that a brochure site never sees. Caching, archive depth, ad load and editor speed all become load-bearing, and they all interact.
Delivered in this sector
Real projects, linked. Nothing on this page is stock sector copy.
The problem
Where news sites buckle
The problems in publishing are rarely about how the site looks.
Advertising destroys the vitals
Third-party ad scripts are usually the single largest cost on a news page, and the layout shift from late-loading slots is worse than the bytes. Reserved slot dimensions and strict script scheduling recover most of it without reducing inventory.
The archive is effectively invisible
Years of articles sit behind pagination thirty pages deep with no topic structure. Crawlers never reach most of it and readers certainly do not. Topic hubs, tag architecture and sensible internal linking turn an archive back into an asset.
Caching fights the newsroom
Aggressive full-page caching makes the site fast and makes a correction take twenty minutes to appear. The fix is targeted invalidation on publish, not a blunt TTL that someone eventually turns off.
Editors are the bottleneck
If filing a story means fighting a page builder, the newsroom routes around the CMS and quality drops. Editorial tooling should be boring, fast and shaped like the work.
Nothing is structured for discovery surfaces
Article markup, author entities, publication dates and image sizing are what let a story be eligible for Top Stories and Discover. Missing them does not produce an error anywhere — it just quietly caps your reach.
2 projects
We have shipped this already
Two high-volume publishing platforms we built.
The Malay Tribune
A real-time news hub built for volume
News Aggregation
- Custom Website Design
- Speed Optimization
Malay.news
A 24-hour news platform
Digital Media
- Custom Website Design
- Speed Optimization
Outcome figures are published only where the client has confirmed them. Where you see none, we did not have a number we could stand behind. See all work · How we approach search
What we would do
The services that move the needle in news & media
Media work leans heavily on performance and information architecture.
Custom Website Design
Article, section and hub templates designed for scanning, with ad slots planned as part of the layout.
Service detailsSpeed Optimization
Core Web Vitals held under real ad load — the hard version of the problem, not the demo version.
Service detailsWordPress Development
Editorial workflow, roles and custom fields built around how your desk actually files and edits.
Service detailsSearch Engine Optimization
Article schema, topic hubs and archive architecture so the back catalog keeps earning traffic.
Service details
News & Media FAQs
What people ask us first
The questions that come up on nearly every call in this sector, answered the way we would answer them on the phone.
Ask us something elseCan you keep Core Web Vitals green with our ad stack running?
Largely, yes — but it takes decisions the ad team has to agree to. Reserved slot heights stop the layout shift, deferring non-viewport slots stops the main-thread contention, and limiting header-bidding partners stops the long tail of blocking requests. We measure with field data, not just lab scores, because ad behaviour varies by visitor.
How do we stop old articles from disappearing?
Build topic hubs that gather coverage by subject and link to them from current stories, keep paginated archives crawlable rather than infinite-scroll only, and make sure every article links to two or three related pieces. Old coverage then has a route in from pages that are already visited.
WordPress, or something else, for a newsroom?
WordPress is still the strongest fit for most newsrooms — the editorial tooling, roles and plugin ecosystem are genuinely good, and journalists already know it. We reach for a headless front end only when the publishing volume or front-end complexity justifies running two systems instead of one.
How quickly can a correction go live?
Seconds. We configure cache invalidation to fire on publish and update for the affected article, its section pages and the homepage, rather than waiting for a timed expiry. Breaking news does not wait for a cache window.
Tell us your publishing volume
Stories per day, monthly sessions and how your ads are served. That is enough for us to say where the ceiling currently is.