Daily Rituals: performance WordPress for a media brand.
Daily Rituals needed a platform built for speed, ad infrastructure and scale, not a page builder approximation. We moved the site off Elementor, built a fully custom WordPress theme, and delivered 90+ Lighthouse scores on both mobile and desktop. An ongoing long-term engagement.
- Client
- Daily Rituals, Germany
- Industry
- Media & publishing
- Scope
- WordPress · Performance · UI/UX
- Engagement
- 2023 to now, ongoing
A page builder that had become the ceiling
The challenge
Daily Rituals is a media brand built on content and advertising revenue. When they came to us, the site was running on Elementor, a page builder that had made it easy to launch but was working against the brand at scale: slow load times, bloated markup, and a platform that couldn't support the ad infrastructure a performance-driven media business depends on.
A slow site costs media brands directly. Every extra second of load time is ad revenue left behind, audience retention lost, and SEO signals degraded. The platform had become a ceiling.
Our approach
Rebuild from scratch on a fully custom WordPress theme, with no page builder, no bloat and no compromises on output quality. Lean, semantic markup engineered for Core Web Vitals from day one, with an advertising infrastructure of ad network integrations, custom placements and programmatic built into the platform architecture, not added on top.
The goal wasn't just a faster site. It was a platform built to hold up under the real demands of a growing media operation: high traffic, ad density, and a content team that publishes daily.
A custom WordPress platform, engineered for ads and speed
A fully custom WordPress platform, designed and built from scratch, migrated off Elementor, and engineered for performance and advertising scale. Custom theme with clean semantic output, ad network integrations, custom ad placement architecture and programmatic advertising support built into the platform from the ground up.
The result: 90+ Lighthouse scores on both mobile and desktop, not as a one-time achievement but as the baseline the platform maintains. An ongoing engagement that continues to evolve with the business.
- 01CMSWordPress, custom theme
- 02MigrationElementor to custom build
- 03Performance90+ Lighthouse, mobile and desktop
- 04AdsAd network, programmatic, custom placements
- 05EngagementOngoing
Why the rebuild was the right call
Leaving Elementor behind
Elementor makes sites easy to build and slow to run. The bloated CSS output, JavaScript overhead and render-blocking assets were incompatible with a media brand's performance requirements. A custom theme was the only path to the scores the business needed.
Ad infrastructure built in
Ad network integrations, custom placement logic and programmatic advertising need to be part of the platform architecture, not patched in afterwards. We built the ad layer into the theme and template structure so it performs reliably under real traffic.
Performance at publishing scale
Daily Rituals publishes daily. The platform needed to hold up under a growing content library without accumulating the technical debt that buries most WordPress sites over time. Custom build, clean architecture, maintained over the long term.
90+ Lighthouse on mobile and desktop, the baseline and not the ceiling
The custom theme was engineered for Core Web Vitals from the start. Clean semantic markup, minimal CSS output, no render-blocking scripts, and images optimised at the template level. Performance isn't maintained by ongoing intervention: it was built into the architecture.
For a media brand running ad infrastructure, those scores translate directly to revenue. Faster pages hold attention longer, serve ads more reliably and rank better. Performance here isn't a technical metric, it's a business outcome.
A platform built for a performance-driven media brand
Daily Rituals now runs on a platform built for the demands of a performance-driven media brand: fast, ad-ready, and built to scale with the content operation rather than slow it down.
It's an ongoing engagement. We stay after launch, improving, extending and maintaining the platform as the business grows. The rebuild was the foundation; the partnership is what keeps it performing.
- 90+Lighthouse, mobile and desktopPerformance scores on both mobile and desktop, a direct result of leaving Elementor behind for a custom-built theme.
- 3Ad systems integratedAd network integrations, custom ad placements and programmatic advertising, all built into the platform architecture.
- OngoingLong-term engagementA continuing partnership: we stay, improve and scale the platform as the business grows.
Code Pros is more than just a development agency; they're a true partner.
Héctor FernándezContent Strategist, Daily Rituals
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