Case study · WordPress & Shopify
A WordPress platform serving 2M readers a month for $180
The Ledger Review's WordPress site crashed every time a story went viral. We rebuilt it headless with a static edge layer, and now traffic spikes are a dashboard curiosity.
Client
The Ledger Review
Industry
Digital publishing
Timeline
8 weeks
Year
2025
0M
monthly readers served
0%
uptime through viral spikes
0%
lower hosting costs
01 · The challenge
Where things stood
The Ledger Review publishes daily finance coverage, and its WordPress site fell over exactly when it mattered: every viral story took the server down. Their host's answer was a bigger server every year, and the bill had grown past $2,000 a month.
The newsroom loved the WordPress editor and refused to lose it. Fifteen editors work in it daily with a workflow of drafts, reviews, and scheduled embargoes that no new CMS could replicate without months of retraining.
02 · The solution
What we built
We kept WordPress exactly where the editors work and made it headless: the newsroom publishes as always, and a Next.js front end builds static pages served from the edge in 200+ locations.
A story going viral now hits cached static files, not PHP and a database. The origin server dropped to a fraction of its old size, and the monthly bill fell from $2,000 to about $180.
03 · The approach
How we did it
Keep the newsroom happy
WordPress stayed as the editing home with every workflow intact, so fifteen editors needed zero retraining.
Go headless and static
A Next.js front end pulls from the WordPress API and pre-renders every article, updating within seconds of publish.
Serve from the edge
Static pages cached in 200+ edge locations, so a traffic spike hits the CDN and never touches the origin.
Shrink the bill
With PHP out of the hot path, the origin server downsized dramatically, cutting hosting costs by over 90%.
04 · The stack
Built with
Chosen for this project, not from a default template. Every build gets the stack its problem deserves.
“We used to dread going viral. Now the biggest traffic day in our history registered as a flat line on the server graph.”
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