DollarSprout is a personal finance publication. A site in this category is judged on how fast it loads and how it holds up when a piece takes off, so most of the engineering sits in the theme layer and the delivery path rather than in features.
I was technical lead on DollarSprout at 1.2M monthly page views — 40,000+ a day, 12M readers in total — and owned architecture, performance, security hardening, and the affiliate integrations. I also mentored four to five junior developers through weekly code reviews and pair programming.
What I built
- A custom WordPress theme rather than an off-the-shelf one, with custom blocks for the editorial layouts the writers actually use.
- Advanced Custom Fields for structured editorial data, so authors fill in real fields instead of hand-building markup that drifts between articles.
- Plugin development for the functionality that did not belong in the theme, keeping presentation and behaviour separable.
- A caching strategy sized for a high-traffic publication, where a popular article arriving at once is the normal case rather than the exception.
- Core Web Vitals work — on a content site those scores decide both search position and whether the page feels quick to a first-time reader.
- AWS CloudFront as the CDN, with image, JavaScript, and CSS optimisation through the delivery path.