A platform for serious ideas

Discovery and identifying key issues

Where the site was falling short

The analytics were clear: 70% of readers were in East Africa, but they were waiting 7-8 seconds for pages to load. Page Speed Insights showed a performance score of 62 on mobile, with LCP at 8.7s and FCP at 5.1s. The site simply wasn't performing, especially on mobile.

Speed wasn't the only issue. The design didn't match their content either. The theme displayed 16 articles at once above the fold. This newspaper-style layout didn't suit Curate Oromia's content model, which focuses on several, long-form thinkpieces and a few shorter news articles per month. Curate Oromia had conducted some user research and found that many visitors had trouble determining which articles were new.

Before making any technical decisions, we worked with the client to understand their audience and goals through a discovery process. We learned a few crucial things:

• The majority of Curate Oromia's readership was in East Africa, especially Ethiopia and Kenya.
• Most users accessed Curate Oromia's site using mobile phones.
• Many users were experiencing load times in excess of 7 seconds.

This research informed every subsequent choice about architecture, hosting, and design.

Choosing the right architecture

Headless WordPress, static generation, and edge delivery

The client wanted to keep WordPress as their CMS to maintain their existing editorial workflow, so we went headless. WordPress handles content through the REST API, while Astro generates a static site that serves pre-rendered HTML. This combination eliminates server-side processing on every request and minimizes JavaScript shipped to the browser. While we tend to favor Server-Side Rendering (SSR) for most projects, but in this case static generation was a clear winner given Curate Oromia's technical requirements: no user accounts, large blocks of content, and significantly faster loading.

Hosting was a strategic decision based on the audience data. Because most readers are in East Africa, we needed a provider with strong edge presence in that region. Cloudflare's network offered the largest network of servers where we needed them. Cloudflare Pages' free plan was more than sufficient for Curate Oromia's needs, actually saving them money on hosting post-redesign. To smooth the transition, we built a custom WordPress plugin that triggers both production and preview builds directly from the dashboard, giving the client control over when content updates.

Redesigning for credibility and authority

Curate Oromia publishes serious, intellectual content. The new design needed to reflect that. We spent ample time discussing Curate Oromia's design goals and preferences before beginning to develop a design language that reflected their identity.

The point of a news site is to be read. As such, typography was absolutely critical. Bold choices could be more expressive, but at the expense of readability. After some back-and-forth, we settled on a relatively conservative set of typographical choices that judiciously uses font weight and a strong contrast between heading and UI typefaces to create a sense of identity while remaning extremely easy to read.

Color was equally important. We chose a subtle cream off-white background and charcoal black foreground to create a softer contrast that still met accessibility guidelines. Crimson accents reference the Oromia flag and are used for highlighted text and link hovers. Line height and column width were carefully chosen for long-form reading comfort.

The client reported immediate positive feedback from readers, calling the new site "higher-end" and more "professional".

Performance optimization

Image optimization, loading strategies, and lightweight analytics

Images were a major culprit in the old site's poor performance. The WordPress theme loaded non-optimized images in formats like JPG eagerly, regardless of position on the page. The new site pulls and optimizes images at build time using Astro, so they're ready to serve instantly. Above-the-fold images load eagerly, while below-the-fold content lazy loads as needed.

The old WordPress theme shipped dozens of Javascript script tags to the browser that served little or no purpose, further slowing the load time while fetching remote scripts. These were stripped out and replaced with bundled alternatives wherever possible. For analytics, we chose Umami based on the client's needs: straightforward analytics with minimal overhead.

Results

From failing to near-perfect Core Web Vitals

The results were dramatic. On desktop, the site now scores 100 across all metrics: FCP at 0.3s, LCP at 0.8s, TBT at 0ms, and CLS at 0.

Of course, as we established at the beginning of the project, improved mobile performance was critical. For benchmarking mobile performance, we simulated a slow 4G connection to capture the likely mobile experience across much of the region. Mobile performance hit 89 with 100s in the other three metrics: FCP at 1.8s, LCP at 3.3s, TBT at 50ms, and CLS at 0.

Load times dropped from 7-8 seconds to under 3 seconds for most East African readers. The site is faster, looks more credible, and does a better job of showcasing the quality journalism and analysis Curate Oromia produces.