Rebuilding a 50M-audience food media site on WordPress

The challenge

So Yummy is a First Media brand with an audience of more than 50 million social followers. A rebuild at that scale carries a specific risk: a redesign that looks good in Figma but collapses under real traffic, or a page-builder site so heavy it fails Core Web Vitals. The site needed a fresh, modern, fully responsive design and it needed to stay fast while serving a very large audience.

What we built

• The complete site built from Figma designs into WordPress, not adapted from a template
• A tailored custom post type for the content model the editorial team actually uses
• A bespoke recipe page layout built specifically for the way So Yummy publishes recipes
• Custom fields, custom plugins and custom templates via ACF Pro instead of plugin sprawl
• Performance work targeting Core Web Vitals across the whole site

How we built it

Layout came from custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript where it mattered for performance, with Elementor and ACF used for the parts the editorial team needed to control themselves.

The content model was designed before the templates: custom post types and ACF field groups first, presentation second.

Performance was treated as a build requirement rather than a cleanup pass, which is how the site landed a 90+ Google PageSpeed score.

Challenges we solved

• Page-builder weight versus editor control. Editorial teams need to publish without a developer, but page builders add weight. We split the difference: custom code for structural and performance-critical templates, managed fields for the parts editors touch daily.
• A recipe layout with no off-the-shelf equivalent. Recipe content has its own structure. Rather than bending a blog template, we built the layout and its fields from scratch.
• Holding 90+ PageSpeed on a media site. Large image-led pages fight performance budgets. Asset strategy, template weight and field structure were all chosen with that score in mind.

“The redesigned website not only met but exceeded our expectations, providing a visually appealing and user-friendly interface that resonates with our massive audience of 50 million+ social media followers. The team’s expertise in adding custom functionalities was evident — a tailored post type, a unique recipe page layout, and specific features to enhance website performance and user engagement.”

Technology used

More work