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Publishing

Media and publishing websites

Publishing sites are usually slow for one reason, and it is almost never the articles.

EditorialworkflowArchiveand searchAdvertisingArticle pagesthat stay stableSubscriptionsand paywallNewsletters

Take any news site, load an article on a phone, and watch. The text arrives quickly. Then eleven advertising and tracking scripts arrive, the layout jumps three times, a video starts, and a subscription overlay covers everything. The article was never the problem.

This is a solvable engineering problem rather than an inevitable cost of advertising. Ad slots can have reserved space so nothing shifts. Scripts can load after the content. Video can wait until it is scrolled to. Revenue barely changes and the reading experience is transformed.

The other half is the editorial workflow. Journalists need to publish in minutes, from a phone if necessary, with images that get optimised without anyone thinking about it. Archives need to stay reachable, because an eight year old article is often still bringing in traffic.

What we build

The modules that matter in media & publishing.

Not every project needs all of these. This is the menu, and the first conversation is usually about which two or three of them would change your week.

  • Editorial workflow

    Draft, review, schedule and publish, with roles for writers and editors, usable from a phone when news breaks.

  • Article pages that stay stable

    Reserved ad space, deferred scripts and correct image dimensions, so nothing moves under a reader's thumb.

  • Archive and search

    Every article reachable by category, tag, author and date, with search that works across the full archive.

  • Subscriptions and paywall

    Metered or hard paywall with subscriber accounts and recurring billing, with search engines still able to see enough to index.

  • Advertising

    Direct and network slots with reserved dimensions and lazy loading below the fold, so revenue does not cost you the Core Web Vitals.

  • Newsletters

    Sign up, segmentation and sending, since email remains the most reliable way publishers reach readers directly.

What usually goes wrong

The four mistakes we see most often here.

These are not hypothetical. Each one is something we have been called in to fix on a site somebody else built.

  • Ad slots without reserved space, which is the largest cause of layout shift on the web.

  • Tracking scripts loading before the article text, delaying the only thing the reader came for.

  • Archives broken by a redesign, throwing away years of accumulated search traffic.

  • Autoplaying video in the article body, which is heavy, unwanted and hurts every metric.

Questions

About media & publishing projects.

Can a site with advertising still pass Core Web Vitals?

Yes, though it takes discipline. Reserve exact space for every slot, load below the fold ads only on scroll, and keep third party scripts off the critical path. We have taken ad supported pages from failing to passing without removing a single slot.

How do we keep a paywall without losing search traffic?

Serve the full article to crawlers with the correct paywall structured data, which is Google's documented and permitted approach. Cloaking is different, and it gets sites penalised. We follow the published rules.

What happens to our old articles in a redesign?

Every URL is mapped and redirected. Archives are usually a large share of a publisher's traffic, and losing them is the most expensive mistake a media redesign can make.