A publishing platform is judged by what it lets an editor do at four in the afternoon without help. The client's site required a developer for anything beyond a plain article, so ambitious formats were either abandoned or shipped as one-off templates that nobody maintained afterwards. ELIVTECH rebuilt the property on WordPress around a modular block library, replacing bespoke page builds with components the editorial team composes themselves.
The client publishes across several editorial brands from one organisation, with a large archive accumulated over many years. Its WordPress installation had grown through successive redesigns into overlapping themes, plugins with unclear ownership, and page templates built for individual campaigns that remained in the codebase indefinitely. Editors could publish standard articles and needed developer help for anything else. Pages were heavy with accumulated third-party scripts, and the archive had suffered link breakage through past migrations. ELIVTECH rebuilt the platform on a single theme with a governed block library, an editorial workflow with defined roles, disciplined third-party script loading, and AWS infrastructure with a tested release pipeline.
At a glance
The challenge
A publishing platform where publishing anything ambitious required an engineer.
Editorial ambition gated by development
Anything beyond a standard article needed a developer to build a template. Feature pieces were scheduled around engineering availability rather than editorial timing, and the templates produced for one campaign stayed in the codebase afterwards, unowned and unused by anyone.
Themes and plugins accumulated over redesigns
Successive redesigns had left overlapping themes, a child theme overriding a child theme, and plugins whose purpose nobody could confirm. Removing anything risked breaking a page somewhere in a large archive, so nothing was removed and the platform grew steadily heavier with each cycle.
Pages weighed down by third-party scripts
Analytics, advertising and social embeds had been added over years, each loading in the critical path. Article pages carried substantial script weight before any content rendered, and readers on mobile connections waited through it, which is the audience most of the traffic came from.
An archive with broken internal links
Past migrations had changed URL structures without complete redirect mapping. Older articles linked to paths that no longer resolved, and material that continued to attract search traffic year after year was quietly losing the value it had accumulated over a long period.
No editorial workflow in the platform
Drafting, review and scheduling were coordinated in chat and email while the site offered only published or unpublished. Who had reviewed what, and whether a piece was cleared for publication, lived outside the system entirely and depended on people remembering to say so.
Accessibility varying by template age
Contrast, heading structure and keyboard navigation differed depending on which redesign a page belonged to. There was no baseline and no measurement, so the reading experience for anyone using assistive technology depended on when a particular page had been built.
Our solution
A component library editors compose from, on infrastructure that makes changing things safe.
Content Audit and Design System Definition
Four weeks auditing what editors actually publish, which revealed that a large body of bespoke templates reduced to a much smaller set of recurring patterns. Those patterns became the block library specification, defined together with a design system of typographic scale, spacing and colour tokens, so a composed page is coherent without an editor making visual decisions. Keeping the library deliberately small mattered as much as covering the formats, because a component set nobody can hold in their head gets ignored in favour of asking a developer.
Single Theme with a Governed Block Library
One theme replaced the accumulated estate, built around blocks that expose editorial choices such as emphasis and layout while holding visual decisions in tokens. Editors compose feature pieces, explainers and interactive formats without development, and because blocks are versioned, improving one updates every page using it rather than leaving older pages behind. Blocks that proved unused after a period are retired deliberately, which is the discipline the previous estate never had and the reason it kept growing.
Editorial Workflow, Performance and Accessibility
Draft, review, approved and scheduled states with role-based permissions moved editorial coordination into the platform, so who cleared a piece and when is held against the piece itself rather than in a chat thread nobody can search later. Third-party scripts were audited, removed where unowned, and the remainder deferred out of the critical path with a performance budget enforced in the pipeline, so a future addition has to justify its weight rather than arrive unnoticed. Every block was built to WCAG 2.2 AA with heading structure, contrast and keyboard behaviour verified automatically in the pipeline.
Archive Preservation and AWS Delivery
Historical URLs were mapped and redirects verified so the archive kept its accumulated search value, with broken internal links repaired during migration. The platform runs on autoscaling AWS infrastructure defined in code, with media on object storage behind a CDN and a release pipeline that runs performance and accessibility checks before anything reaches production. Traffic spikes from a widely shared article are absorbed by scaling and edge caching rather than by an editor being asked to wait before publishing the next piece.
Technology stack
Results
Measured once every editorial brand was publishing from the rebuilt platform.
Before and after: platform engineering measures
- Any non-standard page required a developer-built template
- One-off campaign templates left permanently in the codebase
- Overlapping themes and plugins of uncertain ownership
- Third-party scripts loading in the critical path
- Archive URLs broken by past migrations
- Editorial review coordinated in chat and email
- Accessibility varying by the age of each template
- Editors compose feature pages from a governed block library
- Improving a block updates every page that uses it
- One theme replacing the accumulated estate
- Scripts audited, reduced and deferred out of the critical path
- Historical URLs mapped, redirected and verified
- Draft, review, approved and scheduled states with role permissions
- WCAG 2.2 AA verified automatically in the release pipeline
Project timeline
Content Audit and Design System
Audit of published formats and existing templates, plugin inventory and ownership assessment, design system definition with typographic, spacing and colour tokens, and the block library specification.
Theme and Block Library Build
Single theme on autoscaling AWS infrastructure defined in Terraform, block library implementation against the design tokens, block versioning, Redis object cache, and the release pipeline with performance and accessibility gates.
Workflow, Performance and Accessibility
Editorial states and role permissions, scheduling, third-party script audit and deferral, Core Web Vitals tuning on article and index templates, and WCAG 2.2 AA remediation across every block in the library.
Archive Migration and Link Repair
Historical URL mapping and redirect verification, repair of broken internal links across the archive, media consolidation to object storage, and conversion of legacy templates into block compositions.
Editorial Enablement and Launch
Editorial training on the block library, brand-by-brand launch with the previous site retained during transition, monitoring on Core Web Vitals and error rates per template, and documentation handover.
Key takeaways
What shaped the engineering decisions
- Audit what is published before designing components: A block library specified from a redesign brief covers what someone imagined publishing. Specifying it from what editors had actually produced showed the real set of recurring patterns and kept the library small enough to learn.
- Hold visual decisions in tokens, editorial ones in blocks: Blocks expose emphasis and layout choices while colour, spacing and type stay in tokens, so an editor composing a page cannot produce something inconsistent with the brand.
- Version the blocks: One-off templates aged badly because nothing improved them. Versioned blocks mean a fix or a performance improvement reaches every page using that block, including pages published years earlier.
- Treat third-party scripts as a budget: Scripts had accumulated because each addition seemed small. Auditing ownership, removing the unclaimed and deferring the rest returned the critical path to content, which is what the mobile audience was waiting for.
- Redirect mapping is archive preservation: An archive that continues to attract search traffic is an asset, and a migration without verified redirects discards it silently. Mapping and verifying every historical URL was treated as a deliverable, not a task.
- Check accessibility in the pipeline: Accessibility achieved at launch decays as content changes. Automated heading, contrast and keyboard checks on every release keep the standard holding rather than depending on periodic audits.
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