Daily Cargo News (DCN)

About Daily Cargo News (DCN)

Daily Cargo News is Australia's leading shipping and logistics news publication. It runs an open news platform alongside a paid subscriber product, so the same site serves public traffic and gated members. Its readership was growing at the point the platform underneath it stopped coping.

The problem

The WordPress site broke constantly, by the publisher's own account roughly every five minutes. That took down the public news platform and the paid subscriber experience together, so outages hit readers and revenue at the same time. Subscription and membership features were clunky and difficult for staff to administer. A patch job was never going to fix it: the platform itself could not carry high-traffic publishing and gated membership at once.

How we approached it

The call was a full migration rather than a repair, because the instability was the platform and not a plugin. We moved the entire site from WordPress to HubSpot CMS and rebuilt it as a membership-driven publication rather than a news site with a paywall attached. Subscription workflows and a secure member-only content framework went in as part of the structure. A modular design system meant the editorial team could publish and restructure without a developer on call, which is most of what the old setup was costing them.

What we built

• Full WordPress to HubSpot CMS migration
• Custom subscription workflows
• Secure member-only content framework
• Modular design system for the editorial team
• Gated content with member login

What changed

The outages stopped and page loads got significantly faster. Subscribers log in and reach exclusive content without a fight, and the editorial team manages content itself with far less technical overhead. The platform now supports what DCN does today and leaves room for the new revenue opportunities the old one could not carry.