Case Study · Media & Publishing
High-Performance News & Media Platform
A content-heavy news site built for speed and search visibility, with a CMS, newsletter integration, and automated deploys.
- Industry
- Media & Publishing
- Timeline
- 2023
- What we did
- Web development · Content management · SEO & performance · Email marketing
The Challenge
What the client was up against
The publisher's previous site was slow, and for a news business that is not a cosmetic problem — it is a distribution problem. Slow pages ranked worse, readers on mobile connections bounced before the article rendered, and every publish required a developer.
Our Approach
How we solved it
Ship as little JavaScript as possible
Articles are content, not applications. We built on a static-first architecture that renders pages ahead of time and ships almost no client-side JavaScript, reserving server-side rendering for the genuinely dynamic parts. The result is a page that is readable the moment it arrives.
Treat SEO as architecture
Semantic markup, article structured data, clean canonical URLs, generated sitemaps, and open-graph images were built into the page templates rather than bolted on afterwards. Every new article inherits all of it automatically.
Publishing without a developer
Editors publish through the CMS and a CI/CD pipeline rebuilds and deploys the affected pages automatically. Newsletter sends are wired into the same flow, so publishing an article and reaching subscribers is one action, not two.
What We Built
Inside the solution
- Static generation with selective server-side rendering
- CMS-driven publishing with no developer in the loop
- Article structured data, canonical URLs, and generated sitemaps
- Newsletter capture and automated email delivery
- Automated CI/CD build and deploy on publish
- Optimised images and near-zero client-side JavaScript
Technology
- Astro
- Tailwind CSS
- Firestore
- SendGrid
- CI/CD
The Outcome
Near-instant page loads and strong search visibility on a content-heavy site.
- Static
- Pages pre-rendered for near-instant loads
- Built-in
- Structured data and sitemaps on every article
- 1 click
- From editor publish to live and emailed
For a publisher, performance is not polish — it is distribution. Slow pages are pages nobody reads.
More Work
Other case studies
Different industries, same approach: understand the problem first, then build only what solves it.
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