One Stable, Secure WordPress Platform for Four Agricultural and Industry News Portals, Built and Run by Us Since 2021

For a trade publisher, the website is the product. Horizont Média sells its advertisers access to a loyal, professional audience: people who actually make decisions in agriculture, machinery and packaging. That only works if the four portals are fast, always available, visible in Google, and easy for a small editorial team to fill with fresh content every day.

When we first met in the autumn of 2021, the client was working with another digital agency and had run into a technical problem that the agency could not solve. We were asked to step in. After the first call it was clear that we had the expertise they needed, and we worked alongside the agency in September and October 2021 before Horizont Média contracted us directly in November 2021.

The team. We put together a small, cross-functional team: a project manager who handled priorities and day-to-day communication with the client, a WordPress developer who built the themes and custom features, DevOps engineers who designed and ran the server infrastructure and security, and an analytics specialist who set up measurement and search visibility. The project started in November 2021 with a joint kickoff, milestone planning and estimation, a technical alignment session and a shared project wiki.

Architecture. All four portals now run on one managed Linux server, administered through RunCloud, with Cloudflare in front for DNS, proxying and edge protection. Each portal is its own WordPress site, so they can evolve independently while sharing the same operational setup. We migrated the existing content of the portals to the new environment, set up automated backups to external Amazon cloud storage, and wrote a script that checks free disk space and sends an email alert before storage becomes a problem. The new platform went live in early 2022.

A custom theme built for the newsroom. For Agrárágazat, the flagship portal, we developed custom WordPress templates to the client's design: a news landing page with category-based sections, a prominent header banner zone for advertising partners, and dedicated pages for events, the digital magazine, subscriptions and the weather.

A simple, fast editorial workflow. News articles live in their own custom post type ("Hír"), separate from regular posts, with scheduled publishing so editors can prepare articles in advance. Articles are built in the WordPress block editor using core blocks only. We deliberately avoided page-builder plugins, because every extra plugin slows the site down. Editors only need to focus on the content: paragraphs, images with photo credits, and headings. The theme takes care of how everything looks on the front end.

Analytics and search visibility. Our analytics specialist set up event tracking on all four portals, configured Google Search Console and sitemaps, implemented news SEO and checked the GDPR-related settings, and compared Gemius audience data with Google Analytics. We have since also delivered a month-by-month comparison of third-party traffic estimates (Similarweb) against the portals' own Google Analytics data for 2023 to 2025.

Ongoing support with clear rules. Since April 2022 we have worked under a monthly support and operations agreement covering WordPress development and hosting, integrations and marketing automation, security, technical SEO, consulting and project management. Support is available during business hours, and critical incidents are handled 24/7. A shared priority matrix based on impact and urgency sets the expected response: for a P1 issue, such as a portal going down, the commitment is 24 hours and the typical fix takes 2 to 3 hours. Day-to-day work over the years has ranged from push notifications, AMP and ad placements to plugin and WooCommerce updates, Wordfence two-factor authentication, search improvements and page speed optimisation.

Working with the client's team. We work directly with Horizont Média's editorial and marketing staff. Requests come in by email and are prioritised together, small changes are handled within the monthly support hours, and larger developments are estimated and agreed in advance. Every month we provide a detailed breakdown of the work done.

Horizont Média's four portals were rebuilt and moved to a new, shared WordPress platform that went live in early 2022. Since then, the editorial team has worked with a lean, block-based workflow, managing nearly 15,000 news articles on Agrárágazat alone, while the client's own staff can update banners, links and newsletter boxes without waiting for a developer.

Just as importantly, what started as a request to fix a single problem has become a long-term partnership. We have looked after the development, security and operation of all four portals for five years, and we continue to do so today.