A business daily lives by the clock more than most newsrooms. Markets open, earnings drop after the bell, and the publishing system has to absorb traffic spikes that arrive on a schedule a homepage editor can’t smooth out by hand.
That reality drove the performance work on the Financial Post. I worked on the FP build during the Postmedia WordPress migration in 2011-2012, alongside the National Post — co-located in Toronto, sharing the same upstream parent theme, but with its own child theme carrying business-daily templates. Quote tables, market-data layouts, longer analysis pieces sitting next to fast-turn reaction stories: each pattern earned its own template treatment in the FP child without forking the codebase. The parent handled performance budget and infrastructure; the child handled the editorial shape of business journalism.
In 2011-2012, when Postmedia moved the network onto WordPress, the Financial Post landed on WordPress VIP as part of that rollout — at the time, one of a small handful of major Canadian news properties on the platform. VIP onboarding then required Automattic’s direct vetting and a codebase review before the first deploy. That gate is part of why the network’s early performance posture held up: nothing shipped that hadn’t been read by another set of senior engineers.
The discipline that work taught me is one I still bring to financial publishers: tables, charts, and pull-quotes all want to be the loudest element on the page. Restraint in spacing, type scale, and ad-slot placement is what keeps the reader on the analysis instead of bouncing past chrome.