Case study · Hostfully · 2026
Martech Portal
Publishing without opening WordPress. Content syncs from its real sources, waits for approval and ships in 14 languages.
- items in one week, a company record
- 1,065items in one week, a company record
- of changes shipped by importers
- 95%of changes shipped by importers
- weekly publishing pace
- ×2.4weekly publishing pace
- items published or updated
- ~4,250items published or updated
- Role
- Designed it and built it with the second engineer on my team
- Users
- Designers, writers and agencies across marketing
- Timeline
- First commit Jun 8, 2026 · live in July
- Stack
- Custom WordPress plugin, automated importers, Jira and Slack integrations, AI-first development
01·The problem
Before July 2026.
Every change went into WordPress by hand, and a lot of content never made it to the site.
Thousands of pages, by hand
Smart-device pages alone run to about 3,800 across 14 languages. Every update meant opening WordPress, page by page.
Engineers as the bottleneck
Content requests queued behind development work. During the rebuild, a teammate's request took a median of 60 days to close.
02·How it works
Content comes from where it lives. People only approve.
- 1
Sync from the source
Smart devices, integrations, webinars and press sync from where they really live.
- 2
Import
Automated importers map each item to a structured content type.
- 3
Approve
Changes wait for review, with role-based access.
- 4
Publish
Approved items ship to the site, in every language.
- 5
Audit
Every change is logged in Jira and announced in Slack.
03·Results
The biggest releases in the company's history.
Week of July 28, 2026
1,065items published in one week, 1,037 of them through the portal.
The previous record was 393 a week. On the old site, 290.
publishing pace, week after week.
Items published per week, all languages. The portal's average week matches the old record week.
of changes shipped by automated importers.
161 of the 169 changes in the first three portal deploys came straight from their sources. About 4,250 items have been published or updated so far, without anyone opening WordPress.
work closed a month
Jul–Sep 2026 vs. 2025. Without portal auto-logs, still +21%.
median to close a teammate's request
Down from 60 during the rebuild.
of requests now close within a week
Up from 10% a year earlier.
biggest publishing weeks ever
All of them after the portal went live.
04·Timeline
From first commit to record week in seven weeks.
- Jun 8, 2026First commit. AI-first development, about 58,000 lines of code.
- Jul 2026In production, with 20 content modules.
- Week of Jul 281,065 items in one week, 1,037 of them through the portal: the biggest release in the company's history.
- Aug 20263 deploys with 169 changes, 161 of them through automated importers.
- Sep 2026A hotfix pipeline: urgent fixes go from preprod to production through the portal, with re-authentication, a human-confirmed link and an audit trail.
05·What it unlocked
The point was never just the feature.
Engineers build again
Content changes stopped competing with development work, so the two engineers could ship tools instead of edits.
Self-service, with guardrails
Teams publish on their own, with approvals, role-based access and an audit trail for every change.
Safe urgent fixes
Even hotfixes go through the portal, with a confirmed link between preprod and production and a full record.
More case studies
Every figure on this page traces back to a system of record: Salesforce, Chrome UX Report, PageSpeed captures, WordPress databases, Jira and git. Business figures are shown as percentages or indexes.