A national news publisher, unburdened from WordPress
120k posts and a 47-plugin WordPress multisite retired for a national news publisher.
PERFORMANCE
+240%
LOC MIGRATED
120k+
DATABASE
PostgreSQL
TIMELINE
14 weeks
The situation
Meridian Post had published on a WordPress multisite for eight years. The stack was 47 plugins deep, admin page loads took eight seconds, and a single breaking core update had taken the comments system down twice in one quarter.
What we did
- Modeled 14 WordPress post types and their ACF field groups into 9 typed Payload collections
- Migrated 120,000 posts and 900,000 media records in checksummed ETL batches
- Replaced a caching plugin with server-side rendering on Next.js
- Rebuilt editor roles as typed access control functions instead of capability sprawl
The result
TTFB dropped from 3.2s to 0.6s. The admin panel went from an eight-second coffee break to a two-hundred-millisecond non-event. Editorial output per week rose by a third — not because anyone worked faster, but because nothing got in the way anymore.
We retired 47 plugins. Zero were mourned.
Running a similar stack?
Tell us what you're on today. We'll tell you honestly whether Payload is the right move — and what the migration would take.
TALK TO US