News.net is a global news network of more than 110,000 localised sites, from suburb level up to continent, all running on a single heavily customised WordPress platform. We built the ingestion, classification, syndication, media pipeline and elastic infrastructure that lets one central hub feed and coordinate every site.
The problem
WordPress is usually one site, sometimes a handful. News.net runs more than 110,000 interlinked sites on it, from suburb pages to continent editions, which creates problems most WordPress builds never meet: database tables like postmeta and options that grow without limit, traffic that spikes without warning, a wide security surface, and a media library measured in millions.
Why WordPress, not a custom platform
News.net started as a prototype on WordPress while we built towards a custom publishing platform meant to carry the whole network. WordPress was the stand-in, not the destination. Then we kept adding sites to push the limits, and it kept coping. The misconception is that WordPress is for blogs and small sites. Underneath it is a capable PHP stack: authentication, a REST API, a plugin and theme system, database abstractions and caching hooks, and a lot more. Scaling News.net came down to infrastructure and data modelling, not to swapping the CMS out. WordPress here did not mean a cheap site. It meant the right base under the right stack.
What we built
A custom, highly available news ingestion platform pulls content from multiple providers, including Associated Press and Reuters. Each item passes through a classification stage that assigns it to locality taxonomies, from continent down to the specific area, in seconds. Media is parsed and transformed into more than 20 sizes and formats to suit every site, device and provider, and a custom API layer syndicates the result. Curators watch content flow in and assign it across the network from a single system.
Solving scale on WordPress
The platform treats the main site as a central hub while letting each of the 110,000+ sites work both on its own and in concert with it. Sites sit in a hierarchy with relationships to several levels of parent: a Kearneys Spring suburb site has Toowoomba as a parent, then a region, a state and a country above that. Modelling and querying that hierarchy at this scale, on WordPress, was a substantial engineering problem in its own right. It runs on AWS because the network needs room to move: multi-region for redundancy, separate environments for staging and production, load balancers and proxies in front, caching at several layers, and a database tier built from multiple read and write clusters rather than one box. Add the database tuning and hardening on top and the result stays fast and stable through ingestion and traffic spikes alike.
Why it matters
News.net shows WordPress can run far beyond the single site it is known for, when the ingestion, syndication, media and infrastructure around it are built for scale. One newsroom workflow can feed a global network of localised sites, with content classified, sized and syndicated automatically within seconds of arriving.
Build notes
- More than 110,000 localised sites run from one WordPress platform, with each site able to operate on its own and in unison with the central hub.
- Custom ingestion from providers including Associated Press and Reuters, classified into locality taxonomies from continent down to suburb in seconds.
- A media library of over a million high-resolution items, growing by hundreds daily, with each item transformed into 20+ sizes and formats.
- Elastic AWS infrastructure that reacts within moments to traffic and ingestion spikes.
- A hierarchical model where a suburb site rolls up through region, state and country parents.
- A custom curation and publishing system for distributed teams, plus an API layer that syndicates content to different devices.
