Why WordPress for media instead of Ghost or Substack?

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.

How do you handle ad stack performance?

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.

Can headless WordPress handle real editorial velocity?

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.

How do you handle paywalls?

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.

Can you migrate from Substack, Beehiiv, or Ghost?

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.

What does a publication engagement cost?

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.

Industry Media and publishing

WordPress for editorial workflows at scale.

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.

Start a project See our headless work

Core Web Vitals green across our publishing sites

Why this industry

Editorial velocity and reader speed do not have to fight.

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.

Digital publishers past 1M monthly visits

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.

Newsletter operators scaling to a publication

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.

Vertical media and specialty publications

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.

Programmatic SEO operators

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.

Headless WordPress on Astro

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.

Paywalls and subscription engines

Metered paywalls, hard paywalls, soft paywalls, regwall hybrids. Stripe billing, Apple News integration where needed, household sharing, gift subscriptions, group accounts.

A paywall you control, tuned to your content rather than a platform default.

Editorial workflows and approval queues

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.

Programmatic SEO at scale

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.

Newsletter and audience integrations

Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Substack archive imports, custom ESP integrations. Subscriber sync, segmentation, event-based sends, embed-anywhere signup forms.

Signup placed where readers finish, not bolted to the footer.

Ad stack integration without breaking Core Web Vitals

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.

Green

Core Web Vitals on our headless publishing sites, measured in the field

Field data from real visitors rather than a lab score we picked. Google calls LCP good under 2.5 seconds; ours sit inside it, and you can check any of our sites yourself.

What it costs

What a publishing project costs is set by the archive and the revenue model.

Editorial sites break in two places: the volume of what already exists, and the machinery that turns readers into revenue. Those are what move the estimate.

What moves the number

How large the archive is Tens of thousands of posts with years of inconsistent markup is a migration problem before it is a design problem.
Whether it goes headless Keeping WordPress for editors and serving readers something faster is a specific architecture with specific costs, and it is not always the right answer.
Paywall and subscriptions Metering, entitlements, gifting, trials and churn handling are a product. A simple paywall is not.
Editorial workflow depth Draft to publish is standard. Multi-stage approval, embargoes, scheduling across desks and a real audit trail are not.
The ad stack Ads and Core Web Vitals pull in opposite directions, and reconciling them is ongoing work rather than a one-time setup.

Speeding up an editorial site that is otherwise fine is a performance engagement and priced as one, not as a replatform.

Rough idea to delivery

You send the details What you want built, roughly, plus budget range and timing. The form asks for all of it
Within 4 business hours We read it and reply. Nothing is scheduled before we know what it is about
Then the call Free discovery, booked once there is enough on the table to make it worth your hour
Within 48 hours of the call A written fixed-price quote you approve before anything starts

Get an estimate

Quick enquiry

Publishing at scale?

Tell us your article volume, how you monetise and where it slows down. Editorial workflow and page speed are the usual pressure points.

Prefer the full form? Start a project

Why WordPress for media instead of Ghost or Substack?

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.
How do you handle ad stack performance?

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.
Can headless WordPress handle real editorial velocity?

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.
How do you handle paywalls?

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.
Can you migrate from Substack, Beehiiv, or Ghost?

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.
What does a publication engagement cost?

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.