Case Studies
The $840K Content Machine: Headless WordPress for Media
Founder's Codex published 40+ long-form articles/month for startup executives. Their revenue model: $840K/year from display ads (Mediavine) + sponsored content. Legacy WordPress setup (20 plugins, shared hosting) created 4.8s page loads—Mediavine threatened to delist them for violating performance requirements (LCP < 2.5s). Ad revenue was at risk.
Strategic Implementation
& Digital Results
We kept WordPress as the headless CMS (content entry only) and rebuilt the frontend in Next.js. Editorial team continued using Gutenberg + ACF Pro for article creation; content was fetched via WPGraphQL at build time.
Articles were statically generated with ISR (revalidated every 10 minutes). Ads and analytics scripts loaded client-side only after Core Web Vitals metrics passed—using a custom useEffect hook with a 1.5s delay.
For images, we routed all WordPress media through Imgix CDN—automatic WebP conversion, responsive srcset generation, and lazy loading. Authors uploaded whatever; users got optimized assets.
Deployed on Vercel with edge caching—HTML pages served from 100+ global PoPs. WordPress backend stayed on managed hosting (Kinsta) but only handled API requests.
Background
Founder's Codex published 40+ long-form articles/month for startup executives. Their revenue model: $840K/year from display ads (Mediavine) + sponsored content. Legacy WordPress setup (20 plugins, shared hosting) created 4.8s page loads—Mediavine threatened to delist them for violating performance requirements (LCP < 2.5s). Ad revenue was at risk.
The Challenges
- Plugin chaos: 20 active plugins (page builders, SEO, security) created 67 HTTP requests per page and 2.4s of blocking JS
- Image handling: editorial team uploaded 6MB+ PNGs; no automatic compression or responsive sizing
- Mobile ad viewability: 34% (industry threshold: 60%)—slow loads meant ads never rendered before users bounced
The Solution
We kept WordPress as the headless CMS (content entry only) and rebuilt the frontend in Next.js. Editorial team continued using Gutenberg + ACF Pro for article creation; content was fetched via WPGraphQL at build time.
Articles were statically generated with ISR (revalidated every 10 minutes). Ads and analytics scripts loaded client-side only after Core Web Vitals metrics passed—using a custom useEffect hook with a 1.5s delay.
For images, we routed all WordPress media through Imgix CDN—automatic WebP conversion, responsive srcset generation, and lazy loading. Authors uploaded whatever; users got optimized assets.
Deployed on Vercel with edge caching—HTML pages served from 100+ global PoPs. WordPress backend stayed on managed hosting (Kinsta) but only handled API requests.
The Competitive
Edge Delivered.
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