After years of building and maintaining sites for publishers, I can confidently say that news websites are among the most technically demanding projects we work on. Not because the technology stack is exotic, but because the number of moving parts creates complexity that isn’t obvious until you’re knee-deep in it.
It’s not a print publication
Most business websites are relatively static. A homepage, some service pages, a contact form, maybe a blog. The content changes every few weeks or months. A news website is a different animal entirely.
A busy news site might publish 10-50 articles a day, each needing to appear in the right section, with the right metadata, at the right time.
That’s not a website, it’s more akin to a live broadcast. And just like live TV, things need to work the first time because there’s no dress rehearsal. Sure, you can correct typos unlike print but you don’t want to fluff your lines too many times.
The editorial team expects to hit publish and see their story go live immediately. They don’t want to think about caching, CDN invalidation, or whether the homepage layout has shuffled correctly. They shouldn’t have to. But someone has to make sure all of that works seamlessly in the background.
Taxonomy is harder than it looks
Here’s something that trips up almost every publisher at some point. How do you organise your content?
Categories, tags, topics, series, authors, editions – these all seem straightforward until you’re years into production mode and realise your content structure has become a tangled mess. A story about a government policy might sit in ‘Politics’, but also in ‘Business’, and maybe in a special series on the cost of living. Where does it live? How does it surface in search? What happens on the category page?
If it’s unintuitive, and readers can’t find what they’re looking for, it’s a poor reader experience. Your SEO suffers. Your editorial team wastes time trying to work around a structure that doesn’t reflect how they actually think about their content.
We spend more time on content architecture than most clients expect. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s foundational. Get the foundations right early on and design, development, search and personalisation becomes much easier to deal with.
The traffic rush
A corporate website might get a few thousand visits a day, and nobody notices the difference between Tuesday and Thursday. News sites don’t have that luxury.
Traffic is unpredictable and spiky. A story goes viral on social media, and suddenly you’re handling ten times your normal load. An election night, a breaking news event, a controversial opinion piece – any of these can send traffic through the roof with zero warning.
We’ve seen sites go from 5,000 concurrent users to 50,000 in under an hour. If your infrastructure isn’t ready for that, your readers get an error page at exactly the moment they want your content most.
This is where the “Sleep better” part of what we do really matters. Load balancing, auto-scaling, aggressive caching strategies, and proper CDN configuration aren’t exciting topics for stakeholder meetings, but they’re the difference between capitalising on a viral moment and watching your site fall over in front of a massive audience.
Ads, paywalls and the revenue
Here’s where it gets properly complicated. Most news sites need to make money, and the commercial layer can add enormous technical complexity.
Ad delivery alone is a minefield. You’re dealing with header bidding, lazy loading ad slots, multiple ad networks competing in real-time auctions, and all of this needs to happen without destroying your page load speed or your Core Web Vitals scores. Get the balance wrong, and you either lose ad revenue or lose readers. Possibly both.
Then there’s the paywall question. Metered access? Hard paywall? Freemium model? Each approach has different technical requirements, and each one affects how search engines crawl and index your content.
A metered paywall needs to track anonymous users across sessions. A registration wall needs authentication flows. A hybrid model needs logic to determine which content is free and which isn’t – and that logic often changes based on editorial or commercial decisions that happen weekly. No two sites are the same just like the business models behind them.
We’ve seen publishers implement paywalls that accidentally blocked Google from indexing their content, effectively making their articles invisible. That’s not a small mistake when your business model depends on organic search traffic.
The archive
A magazine or newspaper that’s been publishing for decades might have an archive of 100,000+ articles. That’s a significant asset – but also a significant headache.
Legacy content often exists in outdated formats, broken CMS structures, or databases that were designed for a completely different era of web publishing. Migrating that content while preserving URLs, metadata, images, and internal links is painstaking work. Break the wrong redirect, and you lose years of accumulated SEO value overnight.
But a well-maintained archive is genuinely valuable. Evergreen content drives consistent organic traffic. Historical articles provide context for current stories. And for publishers exploring subscription models, a deep archive can be a compelling reason for readers to pay.
Editorial workflow isn’t optional
Behind every published article is a workflow. Writers draft, editors review, sub-editors check, images get sourced and sized, SEO metadata gets added, social copy gets written. For a busy editorial team, this is happening for multiple stories simultaneously, often under tight deadlines.
The CMS needs to support this without getting in the way. Role-based permissions, revision history, scheduled publishing, and content staging – these aren’t nice-to-haves, they’re essential. If a junior writer can accidentally publish an unfinished draft to the live site, that’s a technical failure, not a human one.
We’ve worked with editorial teams who were fighting their CMS daily, spending more time on workarounds than on actual journalism. A CMS should feel invisible to the people using it. When editorial teams tell us they don’t think about the technology anymore, that’s when we know we’ve helped.
Why does this all matter?
I’m not writing this to put anyone off building a news website. Quite the opposite. Understanding the challenges is the first step to managing it properly.
The publishers we work best with are the ones who recognise that their website isn’t just a container for articles – it’s a product in its own right. It needs the same strategic thinking, technical investment, and ongoing attention as any other core business function.
Too often, we see publishers treat their website as a project with a start and end date. Launch it, move on, revisit it in three years time. That approach might work for a brochure site, but a news website is a living system. It needs continuous care, regular optimisation, and people who understand both the technology and the editorial reality.
That’s what we do. And yes, it helps that we own Design Week, so we’re not just building these systems for clients – we’re living with the same challenges every day.
If you’d like any more information on how we can help you with your news site, get in touch here, we’d love to help.
