Digital Publishing

Newsrooms
that don't fall over.

We power some of South Africa's busiest editorial sites, and the analytics, newsletter and advertising stacks behind them. Engineered for speed under load, clean ad delivery, subscriptions and the servers underneath.

Built for load

Publishing platforms engineered to stay fast when a story goes big — caching, CDN and database tuning included.

Ad delivery

Google Ad Manager and programmatic set up cleanly so ads earn without wrecking page speed.

Subscriptions

Paywalls, memberships and newsletter pipelines that turn readers into revenue.

Server tuning

We run the infrastructure under the newsroom — not just the theme on top of it.

Editorial UX

Fast, clean reading experiences and editor tools your newsroom actually likes using.

SEO & discovery

Technical SEO, structured data and Search Console health baked in from the start.

Under the hood
  • High-traffic WordPress, engineered for load
  • Hand-tuned nginx, PHP-FPM and MariaDB — not hosting defaults
  • Google Ad Manager ad operations
  • CDN & caching strategy that holds the front page up
In production

Titles we run.

Stuff
Stuff
WordPress publishing
→
TechCentral
TechCentral
WordPress publishing
→
defenceWeb
defenceWeb
WordPress publishing
→
What a newsroom platform needs

Fast when a story goes big.

A publishing platform is judged at its worst moment: the morning a story breaks and ten times the usual readers arrive at once. We engineer for that moment. Pages are served from a cache that nginx hands out without booting PHP, the database is tuned for the queries a magazine theme actually makes, and a CDN sits in front so the origin only sees what it must.

Advertising is revenue, so ad delivery is treated as part of the platform, not a widget. Google Ad Manager slots live in code with size mappings per breakpoint, sponsorship fencing keeps sponsored sections exclusive, and auto-loaded articles rebuild their slots so infinite scroll keeps earning. We run the weekly creative loads through the Ad Manager API for several publishers.

Measurement has to be honest. We have found newsroom sites counting every page view eleven times through stacked tags. We set up GA4, Tag Manager and Search Console so the numbers reconcile, add news sitemaps and Discover-friendly markup, and report what is really happening to the people selling the ads.

Newsletters, subscriptions and memberships run on the same stack: Mailchimp or MailPoet templates built from the day's articles, paid subscriptions with renewals that actually renew, and event mailers such as a three-day show daily assembled by script at five in the morning.

Questions we get asked

Straight answers.

Which platform do you build newsrooms on?

WordPress, on hand-tuned Linux servers. It is what every editorial team already knows, it has the plugin ecosystem for ads, newsletters and subscriptions, and at scale the limits are in the hosting and the theme, both of which we control.

Can you take over a site built by someone else?

Yes. Most of the newsrooms we run came to us that way. We audit the theme, plugins, caching, ad stack and analytics first, fix the urgent items, and then put a patch and backup schedule in place.

Do you run the ads too?

If you want us to. We handle Google Ad Manager setup, weekly creative loads, sponsorship fencing, newsletter placements and per-booking reporting for several South African publishers.

How do you handle traffic spikes?

Full-page caching served directly by nginx, a CDN in front, database tuning for the theme's queries, and bot blocking at the edge so scrapers do not consume the capacity your readers need. Article time-to-first-byte on our platforms is measured in tens of milliseconds.

What about Google News and Discover?

We add a live news sitemap, correct NewsArticle schema, clean canonicals and the image sizes Discover favours, then watch Search Console to see what is working. Discover is spiky by nature; we make sure the site is ready when a story lands.

From the journal

How it goes in practice.

All journal posts