News Aggregation
A real-time news hub built for volume
The Malay Tribune aggregates news. We designed the site and built it to a performance budget, because a slow news hub is a news hub nobody reads.
- Client
- The Malay Tribune
- Sector
- News Aggregation
- Live site
- themalaytribune.com
The challenge
What this site had to get right
A news site is a publishing system under load: hundreds of articles, aggressive caching, ad and embed slots that must not shift the layout, and an archive that has to stay crawlable. Editorial speed matters as much as page speed.
Sites in this sector all have to get the same few things right before they can do anything else. These are the ones that shaped this build.
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.
Approach
How we worked through it
The same four stages on every project, including this one.
01
Understand the buying decision
Before any design, we work out who lands on the site, what they are comparing, and what has to be true for them to make contact. That conversation decides the page structure.
02
Structure before styling
Templates, content model and URL map first. Deciding what repeats — and who edits it — is what keeps the site cheap to run two years after launch.
03
Design against the constraints
Type, colour and layout are chosen with contrast, mobile width and load weight already in scope, so nothing has to be unpicked during build.
04
Build, measure, hand over
Semantic HTML, a performance budget, accessibility checks, analytics configured, and a handover the client's own team can work from.
What we built
The work that shipped
- Custom Website Design
- Speed Optimization
Custom Website Design
A design system built for this brand rather than adapted from a theme: type scale, colour, spacing and a component set that covers every template the site needs, designed mobile-first and checked for contrast before build.
Speed Optimization
A performance budget held from the first commit: image pipeline, font strategy, deferred third-party scripts, and Core Web Vitals verified against field data rather than a lab score.
Results
On publishing results
We publish a number only when we have the client's analytics in front of us and permission to share it. For this project we have neither yet, so there are no numbers on this page.
Stack
What it runs on
Every site we ship is held to the same baseline regardless of platform: a 1.4 second average largest contentful paint, a Lighthouse performance score of 95 or better, and WCAG 2.2 AA checks on the components we build.
More work
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Want something like this, for your market?
Tell us what the site has to achieve and who it has to convince. We will tell you what it takes, what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.