CASE STUDY · WORDPRESS · PUBLISHING
Rebuilding a long-running newsroom without throwing away what already worked.
City Limits is an independent nonprofit newsroom founded in 1976. I rebuilt and optimized its mature WordPress publishing system around a 10,000+ article archive, with the goal of improving performance while keeping the publication practical for the people who use it every day.
THE CHALLENGE
Make the product better without adding unnecessary complexity.
A mature publication carries a different kind of technical weight from a new marketing site. Years of articles, categories, media, plugins, templates and editorial habits all become part of the product.
The job was not simply to make the homepage look newer. The site needed better database performance, faster public pages and a clearer reading experience without disrupting a newsroom that already depended on WordPress and a large historical archive.
WHAT I BUILT
The work behind the result.
Database and query performance
Reviewed how a large archive was being retrieved and reduced unnecessary work around content queries so the database could serve a mature publication more efficiently.
Frontend performance
Simplified the public experience and reduced avoidable page weight and rendering work so articles could reach readers faster.
Publishing architecture
Kept WordPress at the centre of the editorial workflow instead of forcing a newsroom onto a new CMS simply for the sake of a rebuild.
Legacy cleanup
Worked around a decade-old publishing footprint with the archive treated as important product data, not content that could be casually discarded or rebuilt from scratch.
TECHNICAL APPROACH
Keep the architecture focused on the workflow.
- 01
Diagnose the slow parts before assuming WordPress itself is the problem.
- 02
Improve database and application work first, then make frontend changes where they produce a visible reader benefit.
- 03
Keep the publishing workflow familiar so technical improvements do not create extra work for editors.
- 04
Prefer maintainable changes that a long-running publication can continue to operate after the rebuild is complete.
WordPressPHPMySQLPerformance optimization
OUTCOME
What changed after the build.
Faster content delivery
Improved database behaviour and public page performance around a large, actively used archive.
Better reading experience
The public site became clearer and more responsive without making the underlying publishing model more complicated.
A maintainable WordPress foundation
The newsroom kept a platform and editorial workflow it already understood, with a cleaner technical base for continued publishing.
KEEP EXPLORING
Related work and thinking.
START A PROJECT
Have a content-heavy WordPress site that has become slow or difficult to maintain?
Send me the site and tell me what feels slow, fragile or difficult to change. I can help work out whether the right answer is optimization, cleanup or a careful rebuild.
Tell me what you are building