The WordPress rebuild that grew pageviews by 35%

FreightWaves is one of North America’s leading B2B freight and logistics media platforms, delivering news, data and market intelligence to supply chain professionals across the continent. Its flagship site supports programmatic advertising, first-party data capture, and integrations with Brightcove video and its proprietary logistics data platform, SONAR. Keeping that infrastructure running at the level the business demanded meant a full WordPress rebuild.

After years of using an off-the-shelf WordPress theme, propped up by dozens of plugins, the site had eventually accumulated significant technical debt. Performance scores were poor, the backend was slow and editorial teams were paying the price. Even more damaging, every new feature request had become a risk. With a growing professional readership to serve, FreightWaves needed a WordPress rebuild, not a patch job.

What changed with the WordPress rebuild

A clean rebuild

Off-the-shelf themes try to work for everyone, which means they rarely work well for anyone. The team rebuilt the FreightWaves theme from scratch, designing it specifically around the site’s real requirements.

The plugin count was cut by 50%, with no loss of required functionality. All business-critical integrations were preserved, including programmatic ads, Brightcove video and the SONAR platform. Editors gained a faster backend, homepage curation moved to Gutenberg blocks, and the internal team was set up to own the site post-handover.

Zero-downtime hosting migration

The rebuild came with an added layer of complexity: migrating the entire rebuilt application to a new hosting provider. The FreightWaves site moved to a new hosting provider with zero downtime, keeping the business running without interruption throughout the transition.

Tech debt cleared to zero

The WordPress rebuild did more than lift performance scores; it removed the drag on the whole business. With a leaner, faster stack in place, FreightWaves now had a platform to build on, rather than fight against. As a result, what Nick Torres described as near-zero technical debt became a reality: “Our technical debt was essentially cleared to zero from a WordPress point of view.”

Key Stats

Quote

“From the media side of FreightWaves, one of the most valuable investments we’ve made was the work The Code Company did. It’s almost immeasurable the amount of potential and growth we’ve unlocked.”

NICK TORRES, DIRECTOR OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGY, FREIGHTWAVES