Malay News Case Study | Custom WordPress News Theme

37: source feeds imported by the theme
65 KB: home page HTML, against 234 KB before
0: page builders, 0 jQuery
1: small script on the page

Malay News | News Portal, full page design — Scroll inside the frame to see the full page.

01 · The brief

What Shahdat Hossain needed

Malay News is a Malay-language online newspaper from Kuala Lumpur that gathers stories from many Malaysian sources onto one front page. It ran on a stack of Astra, Elementor, Yoast and a feed plugin, which made every page heavy, and it needed a news site that loads quickly, keeps its own branding and still pulls in new stories all day.

02 · What I built

How it works

A custom WordPress theme with no page builder and no jQuery, replacing the plugin stack. A feed importer is built into the theme: 37 source feeds with a dashboard, schedules, logs, duplicate checks and automatic clean-up of old posts. The home page carries a latest-stories ticker, a lead story, section rows for national, sports, showbiz, world news, business, lifestyle and technology, a load-more list and a dark mode. Pages are served from a static cache, and every article carries its title, description, canonical, social tags and NewsArticle markup. Contact and advertise forms, ad-code slots and a sponsored-post label are part of the theme, and the site is hardened against the usual WordPress attacks.

Custom theme replacing Astra, Elementor, Yoast and the feed plugin
Home page with a ticker, a lead story and a row for each section
Feed importer with a dashboard, schedules and logs
Static page cache and skeleton loading
Article, section, contact and advertise pages
Ad-code slots and a sponsored-post label

03 · Tech stack

What it runs on

The tools behind the build and the job each one does.

01WordPressStories, sections and the admin the team already knew.

02Custom themeHeader, home, section and article pages written for the site, replacing Astra and Elementor.

03Built-in feed importerPulls stories from 37 sources on a schedule, with a log per feed, a duplicate guard and clean-up of old posts.

04Static page cachePages are served as files, so most visits never reach the database.

05NewsArticle markupTitles, canonicals and social tags on every story.

06Dark mode and mobile menuA theme switch and a drawer menu in the same small script.

The result04 · Outcome

What it delivered

A news portal that carries far less code than before, with no plugin stack to keep updated and a feed importer the owner controls from one screen.

Home page HTML of about 65 KB against about 234 KB on the old site, measured on the same page
No page builder, no jQuery, one small script
37 source feeds imported by the theme itself, with a schedule and a log for each
Static page cache, so most visits skip the database
NewsArticle markup, titles and social tags on every story

05 · Check it yourself

Don’t just take my word for it

Open the project and see it working. The stack and numbers on this page were checked against the live build on 4 October 2026.

How it ran

The same process for every project

One person from first call to launch. See the full process

01Brief and scopeWe agree what it has to do, who it is for and what counts as done.
02DesignLayouts for the key screens, shaped around what turns visitors into customers.
03Build and testBuilt, checked on phones and desktops, and connected to the tools the business uses.
04Launch and supportLive on the real domain, with 12 months of support included.

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