The National Post is the kind of property where a five-second slowdown isn’t a Lighthouse score, it’s the morning column slipping under the fold while readers are still on the subway.
I worked on the National Post during Postmedia’s network-wide migration to WordPress in the early 2010s. The brief on the technical side was straightforward and constantly in tension with itself: keep a national daily fast under heavy ad load, while building against a shared design system that had to also accommodate a dozen regional newsrooms with very different editorial habits.
What I took from that engagement, and what I still tell newsroom clients today, is that on a flagship publication the WordPress theme isn’t really the product. The product is the publishing rhythm — homepage curation cycles, the speed of getting a breaking story from CMS to cache to reader, the editorial team’s confidence that what they ship will render on every device the way they expect. The theme exists to serve that rhythm. When it doesn’t, you feel it in the newsroom before you ever see it in analytics.
This was one of several Postmedia properties I touched during the migration. The pattern that worked here — performance budget first, layout discipline second, no clever tricks in the critical path — is the same approach I bring to every newsroom build now.