Inside Are Media’s Digital Overhaul: A CMS Rebuild That Empowers Editors

Challenge: Growth Came with Technical Debt

Are Media is Australia’s leading content company for women, reaching over 90 percent of the female population through trusted brands like The Australian Women’s Weekly, Marie Claire, and Better Homes and Gardens. With a focus on editorial excellence and audience engagement, Are Media delivers content across print, digital, and social, while expanding into new revenue streams and investing in platforms that support innovation and growth.

While that growth brought reach and audience scale, it also introduced operational friction on their digital platforms:

• Updates required manual rollout across multiple codebases
  
• Bug fixes were isolated and often repeated
  
• Editorial teams worked in silos, without shared resources
  
• Maintenance consumed the dev budget, pushing innovation to the back burner
  
• Publishing was time-consuming, inconsistent, and hard to scale
  

Editors felt blocked. Developers were overwhelmed. Business goals were out of sync with the tech stack.

Solution: A Unified WordPress Platform Designed for Editorial Efficiency

XWP worked with Are Media to build a shared, WordPress-based platform that met technical requirements while addressing the daily realities of content production.

Key implementation strategies included:

• Establishing a single shared codebase across all brands
  
• Customizing editorial workflows and components for flexibility and ease of use
  
• Preserving brand identity through flexible design frameworks
  
• Running discovery and feedback sessions with editorial staff across teams
  
• Providing structured onboarding, hands-on testing, and collaborative training
  
• Documenting every step to support internal teams long-term

From the beginning, editorial concerns were prioritized. By listening to what was not working, we built a platform that helped every team move forward faster.

Results: A Platform Built to Empower Editors and Accelerate Publishing

Faster Publishing and Increased Productivity

• Publishing time was reduced by 50 percent
  
• Over $250,000 saved in editorial time within the first rollout period
  
• More than 10,000 content items published, including articles, recipes, and reviews
  

Better Tools for Better Content

• Shared editorial features supported creativity across all brands
  
• Workflow governance improved through consistent permissions and publishing paths
  
• Editors gained autonomy, with faster go-to-publish cycles
  

Stability and Scalability for Future Growth

• Support needs decreased as issues were resolved platform-wide
  
• All brands launched with zero downtime
  
• Development costs were reduced due to open-source efficiencies