Bauer Media Group is one of Europe's largest media companies, operating dozens of well-known brands across radio, print, and digital. Their legacy WordPress stack made it hard to evolve at pace across 34 high-traffic sites. We led the transformation to a modern headless architecture that serves millions of readers daily.
The Challenge
The existing platform struggled with slow content delivery for high-traffic sites, tight coupling between CMS and frontend, and difficulty rolling out platform-wide enhancements while preserving brand differentiation.
Every improvement meant touching multiple codebases. Every brand had slight variations that made standardisation painful. Bauer needed a platform that could support many brands while centralising the heavy lifting — without forcing every site to look and feel the same.
Our Approach
We designed and delivered a headless architecture that separates content management from presentation. WordPress becomes the content hub — where editors work — while modern Next.js frontends handle the reader experience for each brand.
What We Delivered
- Headless WordPress multisite treating CMS as the source of truth for content only
- Event-driven publishing pipeline for real-time content indexing and distribution
- Unified Data API as the single entry point for all frontends
- 34 Modern Web frontends with brand-specific styling and shared platform logic
The architecture means Bauer can roll out platform improvements once and have them benefit all brands, while each brand retains its unique identity and editorial voice.
How We Built It
We engineered an enterprise-grade headless platform that completely decouples content creation from content delivery. While editors continue to work in a familiar CMS environment, we built a sophisticated distribution layer that instantly propagates content across the global network.
At the core is a high-performance search and retrieval engine, optimised for the complex queries of a multi-brand publisher. This data layer feeds a unified API gateway, providing a single, standardised source of truth for all digital products.
The entire infrastructure relies on modern cloud-native principles, with automated scaling and deployment pipelines. This allows Bauer to deploy feature updates to all 34 brands simultaneously, drastically reducing maintenance overhead while ensuring 99.9% uptime during peak traffic events.
The Results
The new platform transformed how Bauer operates its digital media properties, giving them the speed and flexibility modern publishing demands.
Outcomes
- Platform supporting 34 brands without duplicating core logic
- Faster publishing and better performance across high-traffic sites
- Ability to roll out cross-brand improvements from one central platform
- Editorial teams continue working in familiar WordPress environment
- Modern tech stack attracting and retaining engineering talent
Why It Matters
In digital media, speed and flexibility are everything. Stratatech helped Bauer modernise its estate in a way that supports both brand identity and platform efficiency. The result is an architecture that can evolve with the industry — not one that holds the business back.