Industry Media and publishing
Headless frontends for sub-second pages. Paywalls that convert. Editorial workflows that match the desk structure. Programmatic SEO at 30,000 pages. We ship the engineering that lets editors stay in WordPress and readers get a faster site.
Why this industry
Most publisher rebuilds make the editor faster and the reader slower, or the other way around. Headless WordPress on Astro is the architecture that fixes both. The editor gets a familiar CMS with custom workflows. The reader gets a sub-second page. The ad stack still loads. Core Web Vitals still pass.
We have shipped headless WordPress publishing sites since 2021 and we run our own blogs on the same stack. The patterns we ship today are the ones that survived contact with real editorial workflows, not the ones that look good in a sprint demo.
What we work with
01
You ship 50 to 500 articles a month. Your CMS slows the editors. Your frontend slows the readers. Your ad stack and your CDN argue with each other. We rebuild the layer that is the bottleneck without rebuilding the rest.
Editor publish-time cut in half, reader LCP under one second.
02
You started on Substack or Beehiiv and you want a real publication. Multiple writers, an archive, a paywall, programmatic SEO landing pages, advertiser integrations.
A publication that does not get throttled by a hosted platform anymore.
03
B2B trade pubs, hobbyist sites, regional news, niche enthusiast verticals. Editorial CMS plus paywall plus newsletter plus ads, integrated correctly so the editorial team owns the experience.
A vertical publication with the engineering of a national one.
04
Thousands of templated landing pages, long-tail keyword coverage, structured data at scale. WordPress plus a custom data ingest plus headless rendering for performance.
Programmatic SEO sites that index 50,000 pages without performance penalty.
What we build
01
Editors keep WordPress for content. Frontend is Astro, statically built and edge-cached. Average LCP across our publishing sites is 0.6 seconds. ISR for editorial velocity, no full rebuilds.
Editor publishes in WordPress, page revalidates in under a minute.
02
Metered paywalls, hard paywalls, soft paywalls, regwall hybrids. Stripe billing, Apple News integration where needed, household sharing, gift subscriptions, group accounts.
Paywall conversion rates 10 to 25 percent above hosted platforms.
03
Custom edit queues, fact-check stages, legal review for sensitive coverage, embargo schedules, embargo-aware preview links. The editorial plumbing that hosted CMSes generic-out.
Editorial workflows that match the desk structure, not the CMS default.
04
Templated landing pages from a structured data source, dynamic schema markup, sitemap segmentation for crawl budget, internal linking automation. We have shipped programmatic SEO past 30,000 pages.
Programmatic SEO that indexes and ranks instead of getting de-indexed.
05
Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Substack archive imports, custom ESP integrations. Subscriber sync, segmentation, event-based sends, embed-anywhere signup forms.
Newsletter signup rates 2 to 4x what hosted platforms deliver.
06
Google Ad Manager, header bidding, Prebid, lazy-load ads correctly, pass Core Web Vitals while monetizing. The unsexy work that determines whether ad revenue covers hosting cost.
A monetized site that still scores 90+ on Core Web Vitals.
0.6s
average LCP across our headless WordPress publishing sites
Measured continuously. Core Web Vitals reports public on request.
Common questions
Editorial flexibility and integrations. WordPress has 30 years of editorial workflow plugins and the largest ecosystem of newsletter, paywall, ad stack, and SEO integrations. Substack and Ghost are great when you need one writer and one newsletter. They are limiting when you need 50 writers, fact-check queues, embargo schedules, and ad ops.
Header bidding correctly configured. Lazy-load below-the-fold ads. Defer ad scripts until after first paint. We pass Core Web Vitals while monetizing. We have shipped sites that score 90-plus on PageSpeed with full ad stacks running.
Yes. Editors save in WordPress and the Astro page revalidates in under a minute via ISR. No full-site rebuilds. The editorial workflow stays in WordPress where editors know it. The frontend just gets faster.
Metered paywalls track article views per user with cookies and a server-side counter. Hard paywalls gate the entire article. Soft paywalls show enough content to convert. We integrate with Stripe billing, Apple News if relevant, and household sharing when subscriptions need it.
Yes. Content migration, subscriber migration, payment subscription migration, SEO redirect maps. We have run four publication migrations and we keep the SEO and the email list intact through the swap.
Headless WordPress migrations for publishers are scoped per project. Paywall integrations are scoped after discovery. Full programmatic SEO platforms are scoped after discovery. Discovery call is free and we send a fixed-price quote within 48 hours.
Running a publication?
Discovery call is free. NDA on request. Performance audit available before the contract.
WBComDesigns is amazing. The WP plugins and themes are of top notch quality with lots of features and updated very frequently. Supports are very responsive and helpful. I use Reign with TutorLMS, and the experience is surprisingly smooth.…