For an ad-funded or subscription publisher, the website is the product — and it is usually fighting itself. The ad stack that pays for the newsroom is the same thing tanking Core Web Vitals, and a decade-deep archive is too big to stay fully indexed. I build WordPress that carries the ads and the archive without losing the rankings.
The journalism is good and the audience is there. The site in front of them is the bottleneck: heavy with ad tech, too deep to stay fully indexed, and renting its readers from platforms that can change the terms overnight.
Unsized ad slots shove the article down as they load, tag managers pile scripts onto the main thread, and the exact system that funds the newsroom is the one failing Core Web Vitals — which quietly suppresses the organic traffic those ads depend on.
Ten, twenty, a hundred thousand URLs — and Googlebot spends its budget crawling tag pages, endless pagination and duplicate feeds instead of the stories that could actually rank. Great reporting sits unindexed while thin pages soak up the crawl.
Your audience and its data live inside a platform, a social feed or a maze of third-party scripts. When consent rules tighten or a platform changes its mind, the reach — and the revenue — moves with it, and there's nothing in your own database to fall back on.
A publishing stack that carries the ad load and the archive at the same time — from someone who has spent years on performance, technical SEO and the digital-catalogue side of publishing.
Reconcile the revenue engine with Google's thresholds instead of choosing one.
Spend Googlebot's attention on the stories that can actually rank.
The markup that makes you eligible for the surfaces that matter.
Gate the content without gating it out of the index.
Many titles, one platform, without the maintenance sprawl.
Fewer scripts, cleaner consent, an audience you actually own.
Median LCP with the full ad stack live, down from over five seconds.
Archive URLs kept crawlable and indexed after restructuring.
Cumulative Layout Shift with ads live, down from 0.28.
Lift in viewable ad RPM after the speed work — measured, not modelled.
Median PageSpeed score across delivered sites — measured on live URLs, verifiable on request.
Substack, Medium, Ghost Pro and the big publishing platforms are genuinely good products, and for a new title they are often the right call. The strain shows later — when your archive is a hundred thousand stories deep, your ad and consent setup needs real control, and the bill scales with every subscriber and pageview.
Built for the archive depth, ad control and audience you'll have in two years.
Excellent to launch on, constraining once you scale.
Product names are referenced for comparison only and belong to their respective owners. If you're launching a small title and shipping a newsletter, a hosted platform is very likely the right answer and I'll tell you so on the call.
I profile your site speed, ad-driven Core Web Vitals, crawl coverage, indexation and schema — free, no pitch.
We design the article templates and structured data, plus the sitemap and indexation strategy that gets the archive crawled where it counts.
Built on staging with weekly demos, Core Web Vitals budgets enforced in CI, and ad slots plus consent wired before launch, not after.
Migration with a full redirect map, a training session for your editors, documentation, a 30-day warranty and an optional care plan.
Yes. Most ad-driven layout shift and slow interaction comes from slots that load without reserved space and third-party scripts running on the main thread. I reserve fixed dimensions for every slot, lazy-load below-the-fold ads, defer non-critical tags and move measurable work off the main thread — so the stack keeps earning while LCP, CLS and INP stay inside Google's thresholds.
By spending crawl where it earns. A clean sitemap architecture split by section and freshness, correct pagination and canonicals, internal links that surface deep archive pages, and log-file analysis of what Googlebot actually fetches. Thin or duplicate URLs are pruned or consolidated so budget goes to pages that can rank.
Not if it's built correctly. Using the structured data Google supports for paywalled content lets you meter or gate articles while keeping them eligible to index and rank. The paywall logic runs without cloaking, so subscribers and Googlebot see a consistent, policy-compliant page.
Yes — that's what multisite plus proper caching and a CDN are for. Multiple titles share one platform, one component library and central editorial while keeping separate branding and domains. Full-page caching and edge delivery mean traffic spikes hit the CDN, not your origin, so a front-page story doesn't take the site down.
A full URL inventory before anything moves, a mapped redirect for every URL that earns traffic or links, structured data and metadata carried across, and re-verification in Google Publisher Center. Then daily monitoring of index coverage and rankings for the first month. Redirects are the first artefact of the migration, not the last.
Yes. That means valid Article and NewsArticle structured data, clean author and organisation markup for E-E-A-T, correct headline, date and image fields, fast-loading pages and the technical hygiene Discover rewards. Inclusion is never guaranteed — no one can promise that — but I make sure nothing technical is standing in the way.
Send me your URL. I'll profile your ad-driven Core Web Vitals, your crawl coverage and indexation, and your news schema, then show you exactly where traffic and revenue are being throttled and what it takes to unblock them.
Most technical audits come back within two business days.
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