Case study · Online publishing
Articles that load before the reader gives up
An online publisher was losing search visibility to faster competitors, and its pages jumped around as adverts loaded. This is how we fixed speed, layout stability and crawl efficiency without reducing the advertising the business runs on.
Project overview
Technical SEO for a high-volume content site.
- Industry
- Online publishing
- Client
- Confidential
- Solution
- Technical SEO
- Platform
- WordPress with a custom theme
- Timeline
- 10–14 weeks
- Team
- 4 people
- Volume
- Tens of thousands of articles
- Revenue
- Advertising and subscriptions
- Constraint
- No loss of ad revenue
Expected business outcomes
What the client set out to achieve
Measured on real readers' devices, not in a lab.
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90%+
Of pages passing Core Web Vitals
Loading, responsiveness and layout stability fixed at template level.
Target on mobile field data over 28 days
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25–45%
More organic and Discover traffic
Faster, more stable pages are eligible for more visibility.
Target range over six months; depends on the news cycle
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Minutes
From publishing to indexing
New articles are discovered through a clean news sitemap.
Measured on a sample of new articles each week
Business challenges
Where the client started
Every article was slow in the same way, because the template was.
Speed
Large images and blocking scripts delayed the main content on mobile.
Layout
Adverts loaded late and pushed the text down the screen.
Scripts
Dozens of third-party tags, several of them no longer used.
Crawling
Search engines spent their time on tag pages and old archives.
Trade-off
The commercial team feared speed work would cost advertising income.
Proposed solution
What the technical work covered
Fixes were made in the templates, so every article improved at once.
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Faster main content
Responsive images, font loading and critical styles so the article appears first.
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Reserved ad space
Fixed slots for adverts, so nothing moves when they load.
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Script audit
Unused tags removed and the rest delayed until the reader interacts.
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Crawl efficiency
Thin tag and archive pages removed from the index, and a news sitemap added.
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Structured data
Article markup validated across every template.
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Monitoring
Field data tracked per template, with alerts when a release makes things worse.
Project requirements
What the client asked us for
The request was to pass Core Web Vitals. The constraint was revenue: adverts pay for the newsroom, so nothing that reduced ad income would be accepted.
We worked with the ad operations team from the first week and tested each change against revenue per page as well as speed.
What the project had to deliver
- 01Pass Core Web Vitals on mobile
- 02No drop in advertising income
- 03New articles indexed quickly
- 04Alerts when performance slips
Key challenges & considerations
What made it harder, and what we did
-
Ad scripts the publisher did not control
What we did
Ad slots were given reserved space and loaded after the article, agreed with the ad operations team.
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A theme changed by many developers over the years
What we did
The theme was fixed template by template, starting with the article template that carried most of the traffic.
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Editors who embed heavy third-party content
What we did
Heavy embeds were loaded only when a reader scrolled to them.
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Traffic peaks that limit when releases can happen
What we did
Releases were scheduled in quiet hours and rolled back automatically if field data worsened.
What we watched for
- Measure revenue alongside speed
- Fix templates, not pages
- Reserve space for every advert
- Put a performance budget in the pipeline
Development process
Template by template, measured on real readers
Each release was small, and each was checked against both speed and revenue.
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Baseline
Field data collected per template, with ad revenue per page alongside.
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Article template
The highest-traffic template fixed first.
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Ad loading
Reserved slots and delayed loading tested with ad operations.
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Script clean-up
Third-party tags audited, removed or deferred.
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Crawl and sitemaps
Index clean-up and a news sitemap.
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Monitoring
Dashboards and alerts handed to the client's developers.
Technology stack
Field data first
Decisions were made on what real readers experienced.
Measurement
- Chrome User Experience Report
- Google Search Console
- Real-user monitoring
Site
- WordPress
- Custom theme
- CDN and caching
Advertising
- Google Ad Manager
- Lazy loading
- Reserved ad slots
Quality
- Lighthouse in the release pipeline
- Performance budgets
- Alerts
Quality assurance & deployment
Checked before it went live, measured after
Marketing work is only as good as its measurement. Tracking was verified before anything launched, technical changes were tested on staging, and every result was reconciled with the client's own sales or booking data.
- Conversion tracking tested end to end before launch
- Technical changes checked on staging with a full crawl
- Redirects, links and structured data validated
- Copy and claims reviewed by the client's experts
- Reported figures reconciled with the client's own system
Deployment
- 01Crawl and sitemapsIndex clean-up and a news sitemap.
- 02MonitoringDashboards and alerts handed to the client's developers.
- 03Staged releasesChanges went live in small batches, each one watched in the first days.
- 04Reporting and handoverA monthly review against the agreed targets, and documentation the client's team can work from.
Final deliverables
Faster pages, and the adverts stayed
Articles now show their text first and hold still while the adverts load. The commercial team kept its inventory, and the editorial team stopped hearing that the site was slow.
The client's developers have a performance budget in their release pipeline, so a new script that slows the site is caught before it ships.
- Core Web Vitals passing on mobile
- Stable layouts with adverts
- New articles indexed quickly
- A performance budget in every release
Handed over to the client
- 01Audit and roadmapFindings ranked by their effect
- 02Implemented changesIn the client's own site, accounts and tools
- 03Tracking and dashboardResults in the client's own figures
- 04Content and campaign assetsTemplates, pages and creative
- 05Documentation and trainingSo the client's team can carry on
Success metrics
How success is measured
| Measure | Outcome | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Of pages passing Core Web Vitals | 90%+ | Target on mobile field data over 28 days |
| More organic and Discover traffic | 25–45% | Target range over six months; depends on the news cycle |
| From publishing to indexing | Minutes | Measured on a sample of new articles each week |
Verified reviews
What clients say about working with us
Verified reviews from our clients, published on Clutch.
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Web Development
Custom Web Development for a Software Solutions Company
We can rely on them to handle almost any task with confidence, as they consistently deliver good results.
Casper Hougaard Jensen
CEO & Co-Founder, Iterator IT Jul 2021 – Sep 2022
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Web Development
Web & Mobile App Development for a Software Development Company
They efficiently organized tasks and deliverables while promptly addressing questions.
Damien Retzinger
Founder, Graycore Jun 2021 – Feb 2023
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Web Development
Website Development for a Software Engineering Company
They have a broad understanding of different technologies.
Eugene Bosikov CEO, Ezibeline LLC Mar 2022 – Ongoing Verified review on Clutch (Eugene Bosikov, opens in a new tab)
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