But it’s also created a challenging situation for organisations working with WordPress at an enterprise level. There’s no real way to distinguish agencies that have genuine depth of experience from those who simply say they do. You end up hiring on gut feel, portfolios, and referrals, and hoping for the best.

Traffic spikes and site crashes. Complex integrations that unravel under real governance requirements. A campaign is ready to go live while the dev team is still working out why the landing page is broken. An editorial workflow that looked simple in the demo turned into a six-week back-and-forth.

From the outside, there’s been no reliable way to tell the difference. That’s now changing.

A New Credential for Enterprise WordPress

In February 2026, WordPress VIP launched the Advanced Professional WordPress Developer Certification, the first serious vendor-backed credential designed to assess genuine enterprise-level WordPress competency. It’s platform-agnostic, issued by Accredible, and valid for three years.

As a long-standing WordPress VIP partner, The Code Company was invited to participate in the beta program, and our entire engineering leadership team has now completed the certification.

We’re proud of that. But more than the credential itself, we think what it represents matters.

Why This Gap Has Always Existed

WordPress powers over 40% of the web. That ubiquity is one of its greatest strengths, and one of its most persistent challenges for enterprise buyers.

Because WordPress is everywhere, developers of wildly varying skill levels work with it every day. A freelancer who built their cousin’s café website and a senior engineer who’s architected high-availability publishing platforms for national media outlets both technically “know WordPress.” From the outside, that distinction is near-impossible to make.

We’ve seen the consequences firsthand. Well-meaning agencies with a reasonable grip on WordPress fundamentals take on enterprise projects and build things that simply don’t scale. When traffic spikes hit, things break. When editorial workflows get complex, the architecture buckles. And when that happens, WordPress almost always gets blamed rather than the implementation.

Other major tech stacks solved this problem decades ago. AWS, Salesforce, and Google Cloud all have recognised certification pathways that help organisations identify developers who understand their platforms at depth. WordPress, despite its scale and commercial importance, never had an equivalent.

Until now.

What This Means for Enterprise Buyers

The WordPress VIP certification gives organisations evaluating development partners something concrete to look for. It’s a signal that a developer has demonstrated command of enterprise-grade concepts: performance architecture, security considerations, scalability patterns, and the technical depth that separates a solid implementation from one that causes problems at the worst possible moment.

It doesn’t replace due diligence. Portfolios, references, and discovery conversations still matter. But it raises the floor on what “qualified” actually means in this space.

For our clients, it reinforces what we’ve always prioritised. The Code Company has spent years building complex WordPress platforms for publishers and enterprise organisations, handling serious traffic loads, intricate editorial workflows, and demanding integration requirements. Our engineering leadership completing this certification isn’t a departure from that. It’s a formal acknowledgement of it.

A Strong Opinion, Loosely Held

For the time being, this is a net positive and a good step forward for the WordPress ecosystem. 

It’s worth noting, this certification is run by WordPress VIP, which is part of Automattic. They’re a commercial entity with their own hosting platform and ecosystem interests, and they’re not the only serious player in the enterprise WordPress hosting space.

Ideally, something like this would come from a neutral body, like the WordPress Foundation. In the meantime, this is the most credible attempt we’ve seen to create a meaningful standard, and the problem it’s trying to solve is real.

The WordPress space needs better ways to distinguish genuine enterprise capability from surface-level familiarity with the platform. This is a step in the right direction.

If you’re planning an enterprise WordPress project and want to understand what to look for in a development partner, we’re happy to talk.

The post WordPress Finally Has an Enterprise Developer Certification appeared first on The Code Company.

Your CMS is a bit like a restaurant dishwasher. Nobody comes for it, but if it’s unreliable, the whole operation falls apart.

The truth is your CMS isn’t glamorous, but it is foundational. Done right, it disappears into the background and lets you focus on growth. But when it goes wrong, it becomes dead weight around your neck, slowing launches, increasing costs, and blocking innovation.

What’s Really on Media Operators’ Minds?

If you’re in media and publishing, you’re already thinking about how to rebuild your business for the future. The questions every operator is facing right now are:

• How do we cut costs without sacrificing quality?
• How do we increase company valuation?
• How do we diversify revenue streams?
• How do we navigate the AI wave?

Here’s the thing: every one of these challenges gets harder when you’re locked into a platform that’s not flexible enough. Or worse, if you’re still building your own CMS in 2025.

The Web Isn’t Going Anywhere, But It’s Evolving

Let’s address the obvious question: shouldn’t we be organising the funeral for the website?

I don’t think so. The web isn’t going anywhere.

Just because we’re in a post-traffic world, doesn’t mean the web is over. 

The way publishers operate and use the web is changing. The future isn’t big, monolithic systems. It’s smaller, more agile, and composable platforms. The central question becomes: how do you stay nimble, reduce risk, and build a valuable business?

The Next Phase Isn’t About Chasing More Traffic

Raw traffic doesn’t impress advertisers or investors anymore. The age of eyeballs is over.

Super-niche publishers are forcing bigger players to move faster to stay competitive. When anyone can spin up a Beehive account and instantly become a publisher, the real differentiator becomes how adaptable your platform is.

Moving into subscriptions, memberships, commerce, or integrating the latest AI tools isn’t just a business challenge. It’s a technology challenge.

That’s where open source makes the difference. If you’re on a proprietary CMS, every pivot is tied to a vendor roadmap and a licensing model. If you’re building your own CMS, that takes even more resources, time, and money.

On WordPress, you can adapt quickly, test ideas, and keep ownership of your audience and IP.

Why WordPress?

Sometimes people think of WordPress as just a blogging tool or something for small websites. But in reality, it’s very different.

WordPress powers 43% of the entire web and over 60% of the CMS market. It’s trusted by the biggest media brands in the world, from TIME and News Corp to ambitious operators like Firecrown.

It’s also constantly evolving. The community, the ecosystem, and the integrations mean you’re not betting on something static. You’re betting on the most proven and widely adopted CMS in the world.

When we talk about flexibility, ownership, and adaptability, we’re not talking theory. We’re talking about a platform that’s already battle-tested at scale.

The Best of Both Worlds

WordPress sits right in the middle of the “build it” versus “buy it” debate. You get the flexibility and control of a custom-built platform without the ongoing maintenance burden. You get the reliability and feature set of an enterprise CMS without the vendor lock-in.

Where WordPress Excels

Let me break down the three areas where WordPress really shines for publishers:

1. Editorial Experience

The Block Editor has transformed how content teams work. What used to take a developer a month to hand-build (say, an interactive quiz) can now be done by an editor or designer in minutes.

“Now that it’s visual, editors and designers can do it themselves. The investment is low, but the long-tail traffic is huge.” – Seth Rubenstein, Head of Engineering, Pew Research Center.

Everything should be a block. This helps you scale. Interactive content is not something you can summarise. It requires people to visit your site to experience it properly. And when you make it easy for your team to create that kind of content, you create more reasons for people to visit.

2. Security and Performance

WordPress has matured into an enterprise-grade platform. With the right hosting partner (like Kinsta or WP Engine), you get:

• Zero-downtime deployments
• Automatic security updates
• Enterprise-level support
• Performance optimisation out of the box

Take Konica Minolta’s experience. Their original site on Kentico DXP was experiencing significant downtime every month. After migrating to WordPress, they’ve had zero outages and seen faster load times across the board.

3. Architectural Flexibility

WordPress works with any tech stack. Whether you want to use it as a traditional CMS or as a headless content API, you can. You can integrate it with your existing martech tools, ad platforms, subscription systems, or build custom applications on top of it.

The ecosystem is massive. When you need a specific integration, there’s usually already a plugin for it. And if there isn’t, the platform is open enough that you can build it yourself or hire someone to build it for you.

Real World Success: Don’t Just Take Our Word for It

Let’s look at how three different publishers solved their CMS challenges with WordPress:

Case Study 1: How the Australian public broadcaster SBS migrated multiple Drupal websites to WordPress in 6 months to fit their ‘audience-first’ strategy. 

Case Study 2: How Australia’s biggest youth publisher, Pedestrian.tv re-platformed from a custom CMS to WordPress to keep up with their rapid growth.

Case Study 3: How the #1 US publication for college women, HerCampus migrated 11 years of content from Drupal ot WordPress to meet the business’s growing needs. 

The Ecosystem Advantage

One of WordPress’s biggest advantages is the ecosystem around it. Major media companies like TIME, Freightwaves, The Wall Street Journal,, Truthdig, HerCampus and more.

This isn’t a “wait and see” situation anymore. The platform has already proven itself at the highest levels of digital publishing.

Your CMS Decisions Impact Your Bottom Line

Your CMS decisions aren’t just technical choices. They directly affect your costs, your agility, and your company value.

The right platform lets you:

• Reduce development costs
• Launch new features faster
• Attract better talent (because everyone knows WordPress)
• Retain ownership of your technology
• Maintain flexibility as your business evolves

The wrong platform becomes an anchor, dragging down every initiative and making change expensive and slow.

Nothing Is Sacred

You can’t be overly precious about past decisions. The business landscape is changing too fast.

What made sense five years ago might not make sense today. But when the landscape shifted, the smart publishers shifted with it.

Your CMS should enable that kind of agility, not prevent it.

Want to Talk?

If you’re looking at your current platform and wondering whether it’s helping or hindering your growth, let’s chat. We’ve helped dozens of media owners across the globe discover the best way to build, operate, and monetise their digital publishing platforms.

The web is here to stay. But the systems that power it need to evolve. WordPress gives you that evolution without the risk of building everything yourself or the constraints of proprietary platforms.

Want to discuss how WordPress could work for your organisation? Get in touch with our team to start the conversation.

The post Why Smart Media Companies Are Choosing WordPress appeared first on The Code Company.

While AI-assisted coding has been around in the engineering community for years, adoption has drastically increased in 2025, and consumer tools like Lovable and Bolt now allow anyone to create interactive websites or apps with natural language prompts. 

This is “vibe coding”, and the market loves it! In July, Lovable hit $100m ARR in just 8 months, making it “the fastest-growing software startup in history”. In May, Cursor, another AI coding startup, raised $900m at a $10bn valuation. Google now says “well over 30%” of its code is AI-generated. 

And for publishers, the mind boggles at the possibilities: The app you’ve always wanted, without the cost. The interactive story that would have taken months and thousands of dollars to build.  

But just like publishers worth their salt wouldn’t risk their readers’ trust on AI-generated content or images, the same goes for code. The risks are just harder to spot. 

How Vibe Coding Works

Code is text-based, making it a natural fit for large language models that excel at recognising and generating text patterns. LLMs also benefit from the vast troves of publicly available code available on platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow, much of which share standard, repetitive code and frameworks. 

This is why vibe coding tools can be good at creating the basic apps that would largely rely on boilerplate code – things like user login systems, database connections, and common interfaces that follow well-established patterns of coding. 

Vibe coding’s explosive growth was sparked by the emergence of advanced reasoning LLMs — models that can break a larger goal into smaller, manageable steps to mimic a logical chain of thought that can be more effective at solving problems. 

As anyone who has used Lovable to create a quick app can attest, it’s one of the “Wow” moments in AI, and a hell of a lot of fun. 

However, the temptation and danger of vibe coding is that the output looks great, and for all intents and purposes, “works”. 

But start asking for more complex features, or consider making it public to the web, and things can go pear-shaped quickly.

Security Vulnerabilities

This is the big one. Vibe coding tools can be trained on outdated code or libraries with known security vulnerabilities. They can also skip over security measures that protect against the dangers of the open web. This can include: 

• Input validation to prevent injection attacks that can allow malicious actors to manipulate your database or steal information.

• Secure data handling, such as preventing sensitive data from being logged in plaintext, stored without encryption, or transmitted over insecure channels. 

• Robust authentication, such as avoiding predictable password reset tokens or session management that lets attackers hijack user accounts.

Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey showed that while 80% of developers are using AI tools in their workflows, trust in their accuracy dropped more than 10% from last year.  

In May, Replit, a competitor of Lovable, said it had found that 170 of the 1,645 apps featured on the Lovable website had critical security flaws. According to Semafor, the apps “allowed anyone to access information about the site’s users, including names, email addresses, financial information and secret API keys.”

We leverage AI tools, but maintain a strict ‘assistance, not automation’ policy. Our engineers are trained to use tools like Cursor to accelerate debugging and scaffold code, but never to ‘vibe code’ which can introduce insecure code and vulnerabilities.

Tim Sheehan, The Code Company
Director of Technology

The risks for enterprise data can come even earlier in a vibe coding journey. Customer data or proprietary code used in chats can be used to train the models of many vibe coding platforms.  In August 2025, Anthropic updated its Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy which meant Claude Coder users would have to proactively opt out of having chats and coding sessions to train Anthropic models. 

While developers are creating processes to reduce security risks, consumer vibe coding tools still pose unacceptable risks for publishers and enterprise use.

Tech Debt

The ease of vibe coding can turbocharge tech debt – the future cost and time it will take to maintain and iterate on suboptimal code and software infrastructure. 

Consumer vibe coding tools prioritise fast solutions to get features to work, without the context of the wider codebase and how features fit into a product’s ecosystem.  It might solve each individual request perfectly, while creating a patchwork of incompatible solutions that can break easily, become more difficult to modify, and create a maintenance nightmare down the line. 

Professional developers constantly refactor and clean up code as they go, while AI often just adds layers: One feature uses this database approach, another uses that authentication method, and suddenly you have a digital Frankenstein.

As highlighted by MIT, studies that show the huge productivity gains by developers using AI were “conducted in controlled environments where programmers completed isolated tasks — not in real-world settings, where software must be built atop complex existing systems.”

In short, don’t skip the fundamentals that have been developed over decades of software development: Careful discovery and infrastructure planning. Fast prototypes is one thing (and a real benefit of considered vibe coding), but fast code for enterprise-grade software out in the wild cannot be prioritised over long-term stability. 

Agents gone wild

AI Agents can act autonomously and access tools and data across a user’s digital environment and are fundamental in many vibe coding tools.  The risks of this are obvious and only compounded in the enterprise. 

While many agents ask for permission first before making changes, things can still go awry. In July 2025, Replit’s CEO apologised after its AI agent deleted a user’s live production database, apparently ignoring directions during a code freeze and creating fake data to replace the lost information of 1,206 executives and 1,196 companies.  While the data was eventually restored, Replit, which in September 2025 raised funds at a $3B valuation, said it would implement changes to prevent it from happening again. 

This repeats the fundamental risk of AI acting in isolation without understanding the full context of a business or the broader implications of its actions. Worst-case scenario, it might “optimise” your database by deleting what they perceive as redundant data, or “fix” a security issue by removing authentication entirely.

Enterprise software has complex interdependencies such as hosting accounts, payment systems, user data and a broad range of interconnected code repositories, proprietary code and SaaS tools. Vibe coding tools are currently not equipped to take that complexity into account. 

STAY TUNED: Next in this series: How the Publishers Can Safely Harness Vibe Coding Tools

How The Code Company Approaches AI Safety & Usage

The Code Company leverages AI tools responsibly, governed by strict data privacy and security protocols to enhance development without introducing risk.

Data Privacy and Tool Vetting

Our AI adoption is guided by a strict data privacy-first principle. We exclusively use enterprise-grade tools that guarantee all proprietary code and customer data are completely exempt from model training, ensuring the absolute confidentiality and security of intellectual property.

Assisted, Not Automated Development

We maintain a strict ‘assistance, not automation’ policy for AI in development. Engineers are trained to use tools like Cursor to accelerate debugging and scaffold code, rather than for unassisted generation (or “Vibe Codingˮ). This approach prevents the introduction of insecure, AI-generated code and fosters genuine engineering expertise.

Code Generation Rules

To ensure AI-assisted output aligns with our high standards, our engineering team has developed custom rulesets within our IDE. These proprietary rules enforce our specific coding conventions, security best practices, and performance benchmarks on any generated code, ensuring consistency and quality.

Governance and Responsible Use Monitoring

All AI tool usage is subject to direct oversight to ensure compliance with our security and development policies. Engineering leadership actively monitors usage patterns, providing a layer of governance that guarantees our teams are leveraging these powerful tools responsibly and effectively.

The post What publishers should know about “vibe coding” appeared first on The Code Company.

As someone who’s worked with hundreds of digital publishers over the past decade, I’ve had the rare privilege of sitting at the decision-making table more times than I can count. And what’s clear is this: blocking bots won’t save media. Because what’s being “saved” was already broken.

The illusion of the pageview economy

The web economy many relied on was built and optimised for attention, not value. For years, publishers pumped out content designed to game algorithms, chase programmatic revenue, and pad pageview metrics. That model only worked while traffic was cheap and monetisation was outsourced to ad tech platforms.

It wasn’t sustainable, and most people in the industry knew it.

Now that AI is giving users answers without sending clicks, the alarm bells are ringing. But in many cases, the only thing being “stolen” is undifferentiated, forgettable content that was never built to serve a real audience need.

If ChatGPT can replace your archive, that’s not AI’s fault. It’s yours.

Blocking bots won’t bring the money back

That doesn’t mean resistance is useless. There’s a fair argument for protecting IP and pushing for better commercial terms. But even if Cloudflare, TollBit or others succeed in creating a marketplace where AI companies pay to crawl, that revenue will never come close to what the pageview economy once delivered.

It might soften the blow. It won’t replace the model.

Too many of the strategies floating around now look like that old South Park meme:

Blocking AI might feel good, but it doesn’t address the real issue: Is your content actually worth protecting?

The shift: from volume to value — and a viable business

The hard truth is that many publishers built their product for platforms, not for people. And now they’re left scrambling.

A better approach starts with shifting from volume to value. Not every article needs to rank in search or rack up a million views. But it should be distinct, useful and hard to replicate. The content that holds up over time (the stuff readers return to, share or subscribe for) doesn’t just fill a space. It solves a problem.

But value alone isn’t enough. You need to know your niche. Know your audience. And most importantly, know how you’ll monetise them.

If advertising is the play, you’d better have the first-party data to back it up. I’ve been banging on about that for half a decade now.

Mumbrella Publish 2019

If it’s events, follow the playbook many have already proven out: tight community, clear purpose and real utility.

There’s still leverage, but you have to use it

Whether you’re a niche B2C publisher, a newsroom or a brand, the same principle applies. Content must deliver tangible value. Not visibility. Not vanity metrics.

The good news? Many publishers still have leverage. Trust. Distribution. Deep knowledge. But that only matters if you use it to build something better.

AI didn’t break publishing. It exposed the consequences of chasing attention over utility.

This isn’t to underplay the effort involved. This is hard work. The last 20 years of the web are being upended, and it’s changing faster than most can keep up with.

But the reality remains: if you build something good, people will pay for it. Now’s the time to do the work. Not to build walls around weak content, but to make your product so valuable that people want to pay for it. And maybe even AI companies too.

Note: This article was originally published in Mumbrella.com

The post Blocking AI Bots Won’t Save Media From Its Original Sin appeared first on The Code Company.

Sound familiar? We’ve been there too.

The WordPress Interactivity API keeps appearing in technical discussions, but there are only a few real-life use cases available to review at enterprise scale. As technology decision-makers, you need to know: Is this actually ready for production use in an enterprise environment?

Here’s what we’ve learned from a year of real-world testing.

What You’re Actually Evaluating

The WordPress Interactivity API is a framework for dynamic interactions that’s been in WordPress core since version 6.5. It handles component state, data binding, and user interactions without external libraries. Think tabs, accordions, dynamic forms, or any component where user interaction changes what’s displayed.

Instead of reaching for React or Alpine.js every time you need user interaction, you get a lightweight framework that integrates directly with your existing WordPress infrastructure.

WordPress created this API to solve a specific problem: the challenge of binding front-end to back-end data without external frameworks. If you’ve ever tried to make WordPress data work smoothly with React, you know the pain. Complex setups, state management headaches, and build processes that feel like overkill for simple interactions.

The Interactivity API puts the logic back in your templates, where your WordPress team already works.

Production Readiness: What We’ve Observed

After implementing the API across multiple client projects over the past year, here’s our honest assessment.

It’s past the experimental phase. Currently running on WordPress since version 6.5, with growing enterprise adoption and improving documentation. It’s not as battle-tested as React or Vue, but it’s stable enough for production use.

Technical debt reduction is real. By keeping development within the WordPress ecosystem, you can leverage existing WordPress talent instead of hiring React specialists. Your WordPress developers can adapt to this approach more easily than learning entirely new frameworks.

Performance is better. Fast initial page loads, minimal JavaScript bundle, and tight integration with WordPress caching systems. No more loading states while waiting for data. Components render almost instantaneously because the initial state is rendered server-side.

But scalability requires planning. The API handles standard interactive components well, but you need careful architectural thinking as complexity grows. You have to be smart about architecture to prevent issues when scaling.

How It Stacks Up Against the Alternatives

We’ve compared the Interactivity API against other popular frameworks that we’ve used a lot across many use-cases. 

WP Interactivity API Versus React/Vue: Less mature ecosystem, but it eliminates the complexity of setting up separate build processes and API layers for WordPress data. The learning curve is much smaller for WordPress teams.

WP Interactivity API Versus Alpine.js: Similar approach, but with better WordPress integration. Alpine might be more flexible for non-WordPress projects, but the Interactivity API offers deeper WordPress ecosystem benefits.

WP Interactivity API Versus jQuery: More structured approach with better maintainability. Minimal overhead increase but significantly better developer experience.

The integration story is compelling. Works within existing WordPress hosting environments, with no additional infrastructure requirements, and no separate build processes needed.

Note: For a more in-depth comparison, see the official Interactivity API FAQs here

Real-World Testing: What We’ve Built

We’ve deliberately pushed the Interactivity API’s limits to understand where it works well and where it doesn’t.

Case Study: Multi-Site Email Subscription System

A client needed flexible subscription forms across their multi-site network with third-party EDM API integration. Requirements: dynamic validation, form submission, thank-you messages, and integration with their marketing platform.

The traditional approach would have required external frameworks, complex state management, and potentially separate plugins.

Our Interactivity API solution? A single reusable component with server-side rendering and native WordPress integration. The form handles real-time validation, integrates with their third-party marketing platform, and works across multiple sites from a single codebase.

What struck us most was the development speed. Tasks that typically require coordination between frontend and backend teams became straightforward template implementations.

Advanced Implementation: Interactive Camera Demo

We also built a complex interactive camera demonstration, deliberately testing the API’s limits. This project revealed both the framework’s capabilities and its constraints. It handled the complexity well, but certain architectural decisions needed to be made upfront.

Fujifilm x-Half Virtual Experience using the Interactivity API

Here’s what else The Code Company has to say about the Interactivity API…

The WordPress Interactivity API is a welcome addition to the WordPress ecosystem. After putting it through its paces on an incredibly complex, interactive visual experience for Fujifilm, we were especially impressed by its performance and ease of use on even the most complex of projects.

Tim Sheehan

Director of Technology, The Code Company

I used the Interactivity API to build an interactive camera section for the Fujifilm site, where we needed to manage states between different scenes and trigger animations tied to each section. The learning curve felt pretty manageable as long as you’re familiar with basic state management concepts.

Ivan Goncalves

Senior WordPress Engineer, The Code Company

When It Makes Sense (And When It Doesn’t)

Based on our testing, here’s when the Interactivity API works well: 

Good use cases for the Interactivity API

The Interactivity API is ideal for dynamic components for your project. 

• Interactive UI components: tabs, accordions, sliders, photo galleries
• Dynamic forms with real-time validation
• Navigation systems, mobile menus and dropdown menus
• Content features: Social share popups and content filtering
• WordPress blocks that need to share data or interact with each other

The Interactivity API makes sense when…

• Your technology stack is WordPress-centric
• Your team has a strong WordPress background
• You need standard interactive components
• You prefer reduced external dependencies
• You want to leverage existing WordPress talent across more projects

It is best to consider alternatives when…

• Building complex applications like rich analytics dashboards
• You have multi-platform frontend needs beyond WordPress
• Your teams are already specialised in React/Vue
• You need React’s mature ecosystem for complex state management

The framework’s strength (simplicity and WordPress integration) can become a limitation for complex applications. If you’re building sophisticated tools or complex single-page applications, React’s ecosystem still offers advantages.

Implementation Strategy That Actually Works

Start small. Some WordPress core blocks already use the Interactivity API, so your team might already be working with it without knowing it.

Our recommendation: audit your current interactive requirements, then run a small-scale evaluation with your existing WordPress developers. This lets you assess both technical fit and team adoption without significant risk.

The learning curve exists, but it’s shorter than adopting external frameworks. Most developers familiar with similar approaches adapt quickly to the API’s patterns.

The Bottom Line

The WordPress Interactivity API represents a production-ready solution for WordPress-focused environments, particularly for teams prioritising ecosystem cohesion over maximum flexibility.

Sometimes the best technology decision isn’t about adopting the latest framework. It’s about finding solutions that work within your existing ecosystem while reducing long-term complexity.

If your technical strategy centres on WordPress and you value ecosystem integration over maximum flexibility, the Interactivity API offers a genuine path to simpler frontend architecture. For complex applications or framework-agnostic needs, traditional options still provide more mature tooling and flexibility.

The question isn’t whether the WordPress Interactivity API is perfect. It’s whether it solves real problems for your specific context. In our experience, for WordPress-centric organisations tired of managing multiple frontend frameworks, it often does exactly that.

Ready to evaluate whether the Interactivity API fits your technology stack?

The post Is The WordPress Interactivity API Enterprise-Ready? appeared first on The Code Company.

But we’re seeing a shift. And not just because the market is over the buzzwords. The reality is that many of the supposed benefits of headless architecture don’t hold up under scrutiny, particularly for content-heavy brands like publishers or marketers whose operations revolve around editorial velocity, workflows and simplicity.

Here’s what we’ve observed from the front lines.

Myth 1: Headless = Performance

Performance was a key promise of headless. The idea: decouple the front end from the back end, use a framework like NextJS and the site will be blazing fast.

The truth? A fast front end still requires good engineering. We’ve seen plenty of poorly built headless front ends that are heavier and slower than a well-tuned traditional WordPress site.

You don’t automatically gain speed by going headless. You just gain complexity, including in your hosting and infrastructure setup, which can balloon in cost and overhead without delivering proportional benefit.

Myth 2: Headless Improves Editorial Experience

This one’s a heartbreaker for editorial and product teams. Headless often means losing the autonomy WordPress has always offered. Things like live preview, scheduling, layout adjustments or even installing a plugin suddenly need developer involvement. What used to be intuitive becomes a ticketed request.

We’ve seen editorial teams stall under the weight of technical dependencies. And that friction isn’t limited to workflow, it extends to infrastructure too, where managing separate front-end deployments, build pipelines, and hosting services becomes yet another layer to maintain. And often, they’re left rebuilding functionality WordPress already solved years ago.

Myth 3: Headless Future-Proofs Your Stack

Sure, decoupling sounds great in theory. But what many teams don’t realise until it’s too late is that headless locks you into a whole new set of dependencies: front-end frameworks, API integrations, orchestration layers, and developer skill sets.

That’s not future-proofing. That’s just shifting the complexity.

What’s more sustainable? Starting with something robust and proven, and only introducing new architecture when it truly solves a problem. In our experience, headless often solves problems that don’t exist.

So When Does Headless Make Sense?

We’re not anti-headless. We’re anti-unnecessary complexity.

There are valid reasons to go headless: multi-site front ends across multiple frameworks, decoupled data sources, or when content is just one piece of a larger application. But those use cases are the exception, not the rule.

Even Matt Mullenweg, WordPress cofounder, noted at WordCamp Asia 2025 that many early adopters are returning to a monolithic WordPress setup for simplicity, performance, and plugin access. “It can be good for job security as a developer, but maybe not the most efficient for the client,” he said. The pendulum is swinging back.

We’re also seeing it in the data. The State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 report shows headless adoption in decline, with 75% of enterprises now saying they don’t use it, up significantly from 62% the year prior.

WordPress is already composable. You can iterate fast, preview content in real time, and swap components like analytics or search tools without a full rebuild.

You don’t need headless to be modern. You need to be intentional. Intentional with your stack, your workflows, and your resourcing. 

As I often say to prospective clients, headless adds three to ten times the complexity, but rarely offers three to ten times the ROI.

The Bottom Line

At The Code Company, we’ve seen the hype cycle play out before. Headless isn’t the first over-engineered solution and it won’t be the last.

We’ve stepped into projects where the promise of “modern architecture” led to spiralling costs, added complexity, and frustrated teams. In many cases, clients came to us after months of delays and diminishing returns, asking how to get back to something stable and manageable.

That’s why we lead with simplicity. Not because it’s easy, but because it works. Especially for content-led brands where speed, autonomy and clarity matter more than technical novelty.

If your agency is pushing headless, ask why. If your internal team wants it, ask what problem it solves. Replatforming is expensive. So is slow decision-making and developer bottlenecks.

You don’t need headless to be future-proof. You need a platform that delivers, now.

The post Why Headless (or Decoupled) WordPress Isn’t the Silver Bullet You Were Sold appeared first on The Code Company.

Prototyping is the process of creating preliminary versions or models of a product, system, or concept. 

The biggest myth about prototyping is that it is expensive and slows you down. But, in reality, it’s what saves you from the costly mistakes that really derail timelines and budgets. In this article, we’ll bust some myths and explain why prototyping isn’t just nice-to-have—it’s essential for brands that can’t afford to get it wrong.

Misconception 1: “Prototyping is an extra, unnecessary step”

Reality check: Prototyping is the step that stops you from building the wrong thing entirely.

Here’s what happens when you skip prototyping. A client comes to us with a “clear” brief. They know exactly what they want. Three months into development, suddenly it’s “Actually, this isn’t quite what we had in mind” or “Our users are frustrated when they come onto our website.”

Sound familiar?

We see businesses think that they can jump straight from concept to build, only to prolong the time in development because they changed their minds after seeing it or received some poor feedback after launching. The truth is, many clients come to The Code Company without knowing exactly what they want or without proper designs. They have ideas, but ideas aren’t blueprints.

Prototyping allows you to test ideas with users before development begins to confirm that the direction is correct. This avoids costly rework and prevents going back to the drawing board later in the development cycle, saving significant time and resources.

It’s the principle of “slowing down to speed up”, a small upfront investment prevents massive delays later. Would you rather spend two weeks prototyping or two months rebuilding?

The bottom line: Prototyping is crucial validation that ensures you’re building the right product from the start. It gives you the confidence that your investment will set you apart from your competitors and deliver the results you need.

Misconception 2: “Prototyping is too expensive and adds to the budget”

Wrong. Prototyping actually prevents budget blowouts by identifying problems early when they’re cheap to fix.

Picture this scenario: You’re quoted $50,000 for a website build. Sounds reasonable until halfway through development when you realise the scope wasn’t clear, the user flow doesn’t work, and you need significant changes. Suddenly, that $50,000 becomes $120,000. Now the project is over budget and delayed. 

Prototyping is a strategic investment that frees up your time and resources by ensuring a smoother, more validated development process. By mapping everything out beforehand, it saves significant time and resources during the actual development phase.

We’ve had clients come to us with grand visions that would have blown their budget. Through prototyping, we identified their core needs and were able to validate through feedback, which delivered immediate value within budget. We’ve seen prototyping catch major design issues early that would have cost clients tens of thousands to fix later in development.

The bottom line: Prototyping isn’t an extra cost—it’s insurance against much bigger costs later.

Caption: Example of user-testing/ field testing and feedback 

Misconception 3: “Prototyping is just about pretty designs and aesthetics”

Not even close. While prototyping includes visual elements, it provides an opportunity to bring an idea to life, test it with users and uncover further innovation and opportunities for improvement.

Prototyping offers a significant advantage by entirely removing assumptions. As our clients engage with a prototype, they gain a tangible understanding of the user experience, simulating their journey through the website. This approach guarantees mutual understanding with our clients and provides them with a tangible asset to present to their internal stakeholders, thereby facilitating smoother and faster approval processes. No more endless email chains about what something “might” look like.

This hands-on interaction is equally crucial for end-users because modern websites are rarely static, standalone pages. Instead, they require users to move fluidly between pages, often scrolling vertically and clicking through various sections.

The quality of this navigational experience, often referred to as “user flows,” can dramatically impact user satisfaction. A well-designed user flow is intuitive and seamless, while a poorly designed one can lead to frustration and abandonment. Prototyping is instrumental in revealing and refining these user flows. 

By allowing for early testing and iteration, a prototype ensures that the user’s journey through the website is smooth, logical, and entirely free of obstacles, ultimately leading to a more positive and efficient interaction for everyone involved.

Additionally, prototyping also fosters innovation by providing an opportunity for exchanging ideas and discovering new possibilities. Genuine understanding of how to optimise something often emerges only through firsthand engagement. 

The bottom line: Prototyping isn’t about making things pretty. It’s about validating ideas, refining user experiences and uncovering innovation opportunities along the way.

Caption: This is a Figma prototype of a new Fujifilm webpage served to validate ideas with the client and to explore effective ways of conveying the new camera’s story and usage to users

The Prototyping Advantage

Here’s what we’ve learned from hundreds of projects: Businesses that embrace prototyping don’t just end up with better products. They get there faster, with less stress, and within budget.

Prototyping turns development from a leap of faith into a calculated step forward. It’s the difference between hoping something will work and knowing it will. Embracing prototyping leads to more successful products. 

Ready to skip the costly mistakes? If you’re tired of projects that go over budget or don’t live up to your vision, it’s time to consider how prototyping can streamline your next project and save you time, money, and headaches.

In our experience, the question isn’t whether you can afford to prototype, it’s whether you can afford not to. Let’s chat about how we can help you get your next project right from the start.

The post The Power of Prototyping: Why Skipping It Can Be a Costly Mistake appeared first on The Code Company.

For years, traditional digital experience platforms (DXPs) like Adobe and Sitecore have invested millions into convincing businesses that their all-in-one platforms are essential for digital success.

For many marketing teams, the hype hasn’t lived up to the reality.

Instead of greater efficiency, they’re now drowning in tech complexity and locked into expensive contracts, It’s no surprise more teams are starting to ask: is there a better alternative?

This article will explore the idea of composable website technology and explain what you need to know before making your next digital investment.

The Cost of Traditional DXPs

On paper, monolithic DXPs sound appealing: an all-in-one platform promising to handle everything from content management to personalisation. But they can create more barriers than they remove; often slowing down teams at the very moment when speed and flexibility matter most. 

• Technology Handcuffs: Your martech stack is limited to the platform’s ecosystem, even when better or more affordable tools exist elsewhere.
• Slow Innovation: Launching a new campaign, trying a new tool, or pivoting strategy can take months of IT approvals and vendor delays.
• High Costs: Enterprise license fees can quickly balloon into six or seven figures — and that’s before factoring in implementation, customisation, and ongoing support.

WordPress vs DXPs

Why Are Marketers Switching to a Composable approach with WordPress?

It’s simple, WordPress allows marketers to build and use what they actually need. 

As a marketer, you want control over your marketing roadmap without having decisions imposed by technology teams.

Composable platforms give you back that power. You build a stack that is tailored to your marketing goals, integrating best-of-breed tools around a flexible, open-source core like WordPress. And unlike all-in-one platforms, with composable technology, you only pay for the tools you’re actually using. 

What are the platform considerations for marketers?

According to Forrester, digital leaders should evaluate technology investments as key business drivers:

• Time to Market
• New Customer Acquisition
• Site Consolidation & Localisation
• Total Experience – (UX/CX/Employee X)  e.g. low code tools
• Brand Consistency (managing multiple brands from a single website)
• Content orchestration
• Omnichannel marketing  

Real World Success: Commons Clinic, Konica Minolta Australia, FUJIFILM-X and AusDoc

1. Your Website Is A Customer Acquisition Engine

You can’t fix a broken funnel if your website is the problem.

Your CMS essentially serves as the backbone of your entire digital experience, connecting content, data, revenue, and every audience touchpoint. If you’re like most marketers, you’re juggling dozens of tools and are likely drowning in technical debt and team inefficiencies.

A composable approach flips this script by letting you build a site that fits your existing martech stack — and nothing more. You only pay for the tools you actually need, and they all work seamlessly together. And if you get this part right, you’ll often see your traffic surge, revenue soar and your team output double.

Health tech brand The Commons Clinic is a great example of this. When the marketing team approached The Code Company, they were in the scaling phase and needed a website to drive patient acquisition. The original headless website was failing accessibility tests and was also inaccessible to the SEO team, who couldn’t perform their role without developer support.

By moving to a more traditional WordPress setup with integrated lead capture forms, newsletter sign-ups, marketing automation, and analytics dashboards, control was put back in the marketing team’s hands. 

2. Customer Experience: Why Stability and Speed Matter

A brilliant campaign means nothing if your website crashes during peak traffic.

Konica Minolta learned this the hard way. On their previous platform, Kentico, they experienced downtime every single month — directly impacting leads and damaging customer trust.

3. Brand Consistency at Scale 

Managing a global brand across multiple markets demands both control and flexibility. Too often, we meet marketers trying to juggle a patchwork of different websites, drowning in repetitive tasks and struggling to maintain consistency.

The beauty of WordPress is that all this complexity can be simplified into a single, unified platform.

As custodians of the global FUJIFILM-X website, The Code Company manages over 250,000 pages across 47 language regions with enterprise-grade translation and securely, all managed from one platform. With more than 200 editors, translators, and admins working collaboratively (under strict embargo and access control systems), FUJIFILM maintains global brand consistency without sacrificing local flexibility.

4. Content Orchestration and Omnichannel Marketing

Marketing today is omnichannel. Brands need to deliver seamless, connected experiences across websites, apps, social platforms, and email.

WordPress’s composable architecture shines here too, enabling seamless omnichannel delivery through APIs in a way that no other platform (even open source CMS’s like Drupal) can rival.

When Australia’s leading medical publisher AusDoc wanted to help their commercial partners increase lead volume, The Code Company helped them migrate from Drupal and build a new community platform integrated with their app. Now, rather than relying on sales reps, doctors initiate and control their own brand interactions – a total reimagining of the pharma-to-GP engagement model.

The bottom line: Composable Platforms like WordPress work for Marketers

We’ve reached a turning point in how marketers think about their digital infrastructure.

This sentiment was echoed at a recent panel at The MarTech Summit in Singapore 2025, where one theme kept emerging: a shift in how marketers think about their websites, not as a fixed system, but as a flexible, evolving toolkit.

Composable architecture isn’t just a technical decision. It’s a strategic one. For marketers tired of being boxed in, it provides the freedom to:

1. Move faster without waiting on someone else’s roadmap
2. Swap in tools that match the pace of customer expectations
3. Build differentiated and localised brand experiences across regions

Is WordPress Right for Your Organisation?

WordPress powers over 40% of the web for a reason, but enterprise implementations require specialised expertise. Here are three quick questions to determine if it might work for your organisation:

1. Is your marketing team constrained by technology rather than enabled by it?
2. Are you spending more than $100K annually on your current platform?
3. Do you need to move faster with campaigns and digital initiatives?

If you answered yes to any of these, it’s worth exploring how a composable WordPress approach could transform your marketing performance.This isn’t about throwing everything out. It’s about designing for change. So if you’re ready to explore how a composable WordPress platform could transform your marketing performance and business goals, let’s chat.

The post Do You Really Need a DXP? appeared first on The Code Company.

Large brands often face the unique challenge of coordinating content releases that span multiple markets, languages, and regulatory environments. Product launches, rebranding efforts, major announcements, and global marketing campaigns require meticulous planning and execution to maintain brand consistency and maximise impact.

For many organisations, highly publicised content releases represent make-or-break moments that (if not managed effectively) can result in potential brand damage and negative public perception. In these scenarios, it’s vital for all planned content to be released on time, to the right audience segments with 100% accuracy.

This article will unpack the major challenges of global content releases and show you how we’ve cut through the complexity for brands who were stuck in exactly the same spot you’re in now.

How WordPress Can Cut Through the Complexity

With the right configuration, WordPress can handle these enterprise challenges remarkably well – often better than proprietary, expensive CMSs or DXPs that promise the world. 

Common Challenges in Global Content Releases

What typically makes these content releases complex?  We see these challenges crop up time and again:

• Publishing large volumes of scheduled content simultaneously across multiple languages/timezones
• Staggered release schedules, publishing content sequentially over time
• Pre-release and content under embargo, preventing leakage of sensitive material to the public
• Management of media, including images and video, for unreleased content across multiple environments
• Editorial workflow challenges, approval/submission process, collaboration and preparation
• User access control for large organisations where sensitive data is compartmentalised
• Manual processes, often having to be performed outside of work hours
• Not having the ability to quickly audit content releases to ensure all content is prepared or has released as planned

Scheduling, Timezones, and Staggered Releases

For brands operating globally, coordinating content releases across multiple time zones presents significant logistical hurdles, requiring precise timing for announcements to go live at specific times in different regions, such as 9 am AEST in Australia, followed by corresponding times in Europe and North America. Additionally, staggered rollouts with content published minutes apart, each with dependencies like media and links, add complexity. While WordPress’s core scheduling provides a basic foundation, plugins like PublishPress Planner and PublishPress Future enhance these capabilities for enterprise needs, offering visual editorial calendars with drag-and-drop planning and advanced conditional workflows with email notifications and post-status transitions.

Embargo and Privacy Considerations

Early content leaks can severely compromise launch strategies and damage a business’s reputation. With the large number of people having CMS access, standard permission systems simply don’t provide adequate protection. Pre-release content often contains sensitive information that must remain confidential until a specific date and time. This includes product images, specifications, pricing information, or major corporate announcements.

The stakes are particularly high for product launches, where leaked visuals can completely undermine marketing campaigns and diminish the impact of official reveals. Additionally, in large organisations where hundreds of administrators, editors, and translators across the globe have some form of access to the CMS, restricting content to internal team members becomes crucial to prevent accidental leaks to the public.

Implementing solutions like PublishPress Capabilities and PublishPress Permissions allows you to lock down content properly. Need the CEO to preview that sensitive announcement? No problem – utilise time-limited preview links, password protection, or IP restrictions to maintain control. This prevents accidental leaks and avoids those panicked calls from the marketing team when confidential information surfaces prematurely.

Handling of Pre-Published Media

High-quality images, videos, and other media assets are central to most major content releases, but they present unique challenges. These assets often need to be uploaded and integrated with content well before publication, yet must remain inaccessible to the public. Additionally, embedded video content may not yet be publicly accessible adding complexity to the review/sign-off process depending on the provider.

WP Offload Media provides a handful of unique options when storing/delivering media in WordPress, including storing/transitioning media between public and private buckets and serving private media securely via signed URLs. With some customisation, media can be automatically transitioned from private to public buckets when the status of the post they’re associated with changes as part of the publishing schedule drastically reducing the risk of images leaking to the public.

Revision and Editorial Workflow

To streamline enterprise content workflows in WordPress, plugins like PublishPress Revisions provide essential revise, submit, and approve functionalities, allowing teams to work on upcoming releases without impacting live content and maintaining a complete revision history for accountability. Additionally, MultiCollab offers real-time collaborative editing, similar to Google Docs, enabling multiple team members to leave comments, suggest changes, and collaborate directly within the content editor, including features like comment threads, assignable action items, and content approval workflows. This combination of tools creates a sophisticated review and approval system tailored to enterprise needs, ensuring all stakeholders can contribute effectively while maintaining an orderly publication process.

Multilingual Releases

For truly global brands, content must be localised across multiple languages while maintaining brand consistency. This requires not just translation capabilities, but also the ability to adapt content for cultural contexts while ensuring the core messaging remains intact. In scenarios where a “global” version of a piece of content is the source of truth, translations may or may not exist which can require complex fallback behaviour to ensure all audiences are served the right content at the right time.

We recommend WPML for managing multilingual content in enterprise WordPress implementations. Unlike cloud-based translation plugins, WPML keeps all content and translation data on your own servers, providing complete data ownership and security—a critical consideration for sensitive pre-release content.

WPML’s extensibility allows for deep integration with both WordPress’s core workflows and the workflows of other 3rd party plugins, allowing for a truly tailored solution. Advanced features such as translation memory and glossaries ensure consistency across all content, while compatibility with the Block Editor ensures a smooth editorial experience.

WordPress vs. All in One DXPs: The Open Source Advantage

The key differentiator is that WordPress can be shaped to fit an organisation’s existing workflows, rather than forcing the organisation to adapt to a rigid DXP framework. This flexibility pays dividends when addressing the unique challenges that inevitably arise during complex content release scenarios and enterprise agencies such as ours are expertly positioned to tailor a solution to any business requirement.

For enterprises, this means:

1. Solutions can evolve alongside changing business requirements without expensive platform upgrades
2. WordPress can be tailored to the priorities of the business, but DXPs may be spread too thin across unused/underutilized features
3. Integration between open source and existing enterprise systems is often more straightforward
4. Talent for ongoing support and development is readily available and more cost-effective
5. Organisations maintain complete ownership of their data and platform

Real-World Success: Fujifilm and iSelect

Rolling content releases for Fujifilm’s global product release programme

Fujifilm’s technical team was trapped in a cycle of late nights, manually managing global content releases across multiple markets and languages. Their CMS couldn’t handle embargoes, leading to operational chaos. We revolutionised their process with a bespoke WordPress solution that provided:

• A single content hub with localised variations.
• Simplified approval workflows, cutting out email overload.
• Robust image protection to prevent premature leaks.
• Automated, time-zone precise publishing.

The result? Flawless global launches of products like the recently released FUJIFILM GFX100RF camera, along with over 50 pieces of content including support resources, news articles and stories in English and Japanese—executed seamlessly in a 30-minute window, showcasing the power of streamlined automation.

Deploying regulated content changes for a publicly traded insurance comparison company

iSelect is one of Australia’s largest insurance comparison engines. As part of their migration to WordPress, we needed to craft a solution that would allow content that relates to various cycles with insurance updates, such as the annual changes to health insurance.

This content had to transition through a range of departmental stakeholders and have sign-off across the board, including from internal compliance officers. 

As the information was heavily regulated and embargoed, our team was able to extend the core functionality of WordPress to create batched content releases that would allow internal teams to run scheduled and manual releases of content from staging, UAT and production environments. 

This included complex updates like internal linking and secured media assets like PDFs that were prohibited from even existing on production systems until certain dates and times.

Conclusion

Facing issues with an upcoming website relaunch, product announcement, or complex content project? We’ve solved these exact challenges for clients across the globe. At The Code Company, we turn complicated content releases into organised, stress-free deployments. 

Reach out if you’d like to discuss how we can streamline your next major launch. No fluff or fancy promises —just practical solutions based on what actually works.

The post WordPress for Global Brands: Managing Complex Content Releases appeared first on The Code Company.

Poor Core Web Vitals scores remain among the most common reasons publishers first contact The Code Company. Developed by Google to help rank websites, these metrics prioritise a visitor’s experience on-site, regardless of their location or device. As web technologies evolve, Google’s measurement of a site’s performance has become increasingly nuanced. This has led to frustration when diagnosing why a site’s scores are low and determining how to fix them.

Core Web Vitals can be influenced by everything from a website’s front-end code to its hosting provider, and the metrics can sometimes feel like a black box that significantly impacts a publisher’s business.

It’s for this reason publishers often come to us feeling defeated.  Many worry that achieving green scores is unattainable, or that the only way to succeed is by sacrificing essential elements of their business, such as comprehensive analytics, AdTech, or rich media. However, this is not always the case. It’s entirely possible to maintain these tools and technologies while improving Core Web Vitals scores.

In this article, we’ll break down the three key metrics that make up Core Web Vitals in simple terms and share practical ways we and others have successfully improved them.

Key Metrics of Core Web Vitals

Google identifies these three key metrics as essential to a webpage’s overall user experience under its Core Web Vitals framework:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID) 
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

While Google measures other performance metrics, such as Total Blocking Time (TBT) and Time to First Byte (TTFB), the three Core Web Vitals are the most critical for improving user experience and search rankings.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for the largest visible content element on the screen to load for a user fully. This metric greatly impacts how users perceive a site’s loading speed. If a page’s main image or headline takes too long to load, users may view the site as slow, even if smaller elements load quickly.

LCP is often the most challenging Core Web Vitals metric to optimise due to the many factors involved, including server response times, image optimisation, and asset sizes. It may take several weeks for changes to be reflected in Google’s performance reports.

An excellent LCP score is 2.5 seconds or less.

How to optimise your LCP score:

1. Optimise your images

This is one of the low-hanging fruits when it comes to LCP. Images often represent the largest elements on a page, so ensuring they are as small as possible without compromising quality will improve loading speed. This can involve using next-gen formats like WebP, compressing images, and ensuring the dimensions are correct. Much of this optimisation can be done with WordPress settings and purpose-built WordPress plugins, but also with features in some managed hosting solutions. Mobile designs can also be optimised to use smaller images that represent less screen space, which can help.

2. Upgrade your web host

This can be a more complicated endeavour, especially if migrating to or from a managed hosting provider. A sluggish server response time can make every element on your site slow to render, significantly affecting your LCP score. A fast, reliable web host with server-side caching is ideal, but LCP scores can also be improved with the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare. A CDN’s global network of servers increases the chances users have a fast experience no matter where they are in the world.

3. Implement lazy loading and preloading

 Lazy loading is when objects on a page don’t load until they are onscreen or about to be onscreen for a user. For any object, but especially images, waiting until it’s needed by a user can significantly improve your initial page load times. Preloading core assets (like header images) allows a modern browser to start downloading these files early, so when the page is ready to display, the assets are already downloaded.

4. Minimise CSS

Developers can optimise CSS by removing unused styles, minifying files, and prioritising the loading of critical CSS for above-the-fold content. Tools like PurifyCSS or Chrome’s Coverage feature can help identify and eliminate unnecessary CSS.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) Google replaced First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) in March 2024. INP measures the time between a user’s interaction with the page, such as clicking a link or button, and the next visible response on the screen. Unlike FID, which only tracked the delay before the browser processed the interaction, INP evaluates the full user experience of responsiveness, making it a more comprehensive metric.

An excellent INP score is 200 milliseconds or less.

How to enhance your INP score:

1. Optimise (or defer) JavaScript execution

Heavy JavaScript execution can delay browser responsiveness, as scripts are processed in a single thread. Minimising the amount of JavaScript on your pages or deferring non-critical scripts until after the page has loaded can significantly improve INP. Tools like Chrome’s Performance Insights can help identify specific scripts causing delays. Additionally, bundling JavaScript files using tools like Webpack can reduce the number of requests, improving responsiveness.

2. Use browser caching

Browser caching stores site files locally in a user’s browser, allowing faster load times for returning visitors. This reduces the time required for the browser to process interactions, improving INP scores.

3. Audit and remove unnecessary third-party scripts

Third-party scripts, such as analytics tools or AdTech, can introduce delays. Regularly review these scripts and remove any that are not essential to your site’s functionality. Minimising third-party scripts reduces processing time, enhancing your INP score.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the total unexpected shifts in a page’s layout while a user is interacting with it. A common example is the frustrating experience of trying to click a button, only for an ad or image to load and move the button elsewhere. These layout shifts disrupt user experience and can lead to frustration.

A good CLS score is less than 0.1.

How to  improve your CLS score:

1. Specify size attributes for media

When images, videos, or embeds are added without defined dimensions, the browser doesn’t know how much space to allocate. This can lead to layout shifts as the content adjusts. Always define width and height attributes for media elements to ensure stability and prevent layout shifts.

2. Reserve space for ads

Programmatic ads that dynamically inject into your page can cause significant layout shifts, especially on mobile devices. Reserving space for ads, by defining the largest possible ad slot for each device type, minimises these disruptions.

3. Insert new UI elements below the fold

Inserting new UI elements above the fold, such as banners or notifications, can push existing content down, causing a layout shift. Instead, add new elements below the fold to preserve the user’s focus.

4. Optimise font loading

Fonts can cause layout shifts when the browser first loads a fallback font and then switches to the correct web font. Use font-display settings like swap, block, or fallback to ensure text remains visible during font loading, reducing layout shifts.

Conclusion 

Core Web Vitals prioritise fast, efficient websites that provide an excellent user experience. These metrics not only improve engagement for users but also benefit publishers through better search rankings and higher interaction rates. They’re part of Google’s broader initiative to encourage a better-performing web.

However, Core Web Vitals optimisation is not a one-time task. As new features are added and technologies evolve, maintaining strong scores requires continuous monitoring, regular updates, and technical expertise. By continuously optimising Core Web Vitals, publishers not only improve their search rankings but also enhance user retention and reduce bounce rates. These efforts ensure a better overall experience for readers and greater business success for publishers.

Need help with your Core Web Vitals?

At The Code Company, we specialise in diagnosing and fixing Core Web Vitals issues while preserving the critical tools your business depends on, such as analytics, AdTech, and rich media. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.

The post Demystifying Core Web Vitals for Publishers appeared first on The Code Company.