The challenge
Harborline had grown from a weekly paper into a digital-first newsroom publishing dozens of stories a day. Their WordPress install had grown too — but not gracefully. A decade-old custom theme, a graveyard of abandoned plugins, and a homepage that took nearly four seconds to render meant readers were bouncing and editors were fighting the tools instead of using them.
What we did
We started with a two-week audit, then rebuilt the site as a block theme with full-site editing. Editors got a library of vetted block patterns — story grids, live blogs, newsletter modules — they could assemble themselves, with no developer in the loop. Behind the scenes we added a Redis object cache, rebuilt the templates around efficient queries, and moved every image to WebP with proper lazy loading.
The outcome
Largest Contentful Paint dropped from 3.8 seconds to 1.1. Sessions got longer, ad viewability climbed, and — the part the newsroom cares about most — publishing a feature story went from a ticket to our team to a five-minute job they do themselves.
"Emberpress rebuilt our publishing platform in six weeks and cut page load in half. They're the rare team that speaks both design and engineering fluently."
— Dana Whitmore, VP Digital