From WordPress death spiral to a custom AI newsroom
NationalFile.com · Media
120.4K
visitors/90d
11,448
articles
$29,760
SaaS costs replaced/yr
01 HYPOTHESIS
NationalFile.com was in a WordPress death spiral. Traffic had slid from 93K to 23.9K, and the fix-it plugins had become part of the problem. The hypothesis: stop patching. Replace the platform — and the SaaS stack bolted to it — with something built for how a newsroom actually works.
02 EXPERIMENT
I rebuilt it as a custom React platform: an AI research hub, article auto-drafting, a breaking-news ticker, and an ad-creative pipeline that turns out 50+ AI ad creatives per campaign on Gemini 2.5 Flash. The newsroom kept publishing the whole time.
03 RESULT
Traffic recovered to 83.9K within 31 days of launch. It now runs at 120.4K visitors per 90 days across 11,448 articles, and the platform replaced $29,760 a year in SaaS costs.
