How the Tekniikan Maailma revamp paved the way for Otavamedia's unified platform
The Tekniikan Maailma website revamp acted as a pilot for modernizing the entire Otavamedia ecosystem – and the results speak for themselves.
Results
+179%
Increase in visitors
+1 305%
Increase in Google Discover page views
+325%
Increase in ad impressions
27%
Better technical performance than the average magazine website
"Collaboration with Hion was flexible, efficient, and truly collaborative. Ultimately, success can be measured by results, and the growth in traffic is a very concrete example of the project's success."
- Sami Rainisto, Editor-in-Chief, Tekniikan Maailma
From a fragmented tech stack to a unified platform
Over the years, Otavamedia’s digital environment had evolved into a situation familiar to many large players. Ten different brands, varying technology versions, and overlapping solutions had created a fragmented ecosystem that was expensive to maintain and slow to develop.
The technical implementation of Otavamedia’s flagship product, the Tekniikan Maailma website, had become rigid and too detached from the rest of the company’s development. It failed to support the editorial team’s daily workflow or the efficient sharing of content across different media brands, while technical debt accumulated with every update. The site also faced significant technical hurdles: it was slow, and its visibility in search engines (e.g., Google) was suboptimal.
Otavamedia needed a solution that would streamline maintenance, enable seamless content flow between brands, and serve as a foundation for future renewals. The goal was to build a system where the development of a single site would immediately benefit all others.
“Site-specific differences make the overall entity difficult to manage and further development expensive. This project was the first step in building a foundation for future renewals – with the goal of significantly increasing operational efficiency across the board.”
–Riku Österlund, Head of Design and Technology, Otavamedia
Detailed specifications paved the way for smooth execution
Before the actual project kicked off, a comprehensive requirement specification phase was conducted.
“Detailed specifications ensured that right from the first demos, Hion’s developers were able to showcase concrete results. Often in projects, demos only consist of lines of code, but here the work became tangible immediately, and we had actual elements to test.”
–Riku Österlund, Head of Design and Technology, Otavamedia
The project’s technical implementation was a demanding powerhouse effort, bringing 25 years of digital history into a new era. The biggest challenge was the migration of a massive amount of data, covering hundreds of thousands of articles and images dating all the way back to the 1950s.
The success of the execution was guaranteed by moving away from the traditional client-vendor setup. We operated as a single team, where the client tested functional code weekly instead of just staring at plans.
This transparency enabled rapid course corrections, independent decision-making, and the elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy. Our developers were able to make proactive solutions, resulting in a finely-tuned service optimized for performance.
Less is more and a return to native
We focused on a clear vision: technology must serve the user and business scalability first, not temporary tech trends.
Strategic focus: Efficiency for editorial work
We focused on streamlining content creation and daily editorial workflows to drive business scalability. Unifying the journalists’ tools brought significant efficiency gains across the Otavamedia ecosystem, while technical upgrades improved site speed and the overall reader experience.
Technical vision: A return to native and modularity
We replaced expensive custom code with native modern WordPress features. By leveraging Full Site Editing and Gutenberg, the editorial team gained unified, flexible tools. Bulky legacy plugins were dismantled into modular, shareable components, future-proofing the platform across all brands.
Scalable architecture: Separating the theme from the technical platform
We developed a shared block theme architecture where the theme acts only as a presentation layer. This model proved its worth by launching Rakennusmaailma.fi on the exact same platform as Tekniikan Maailma, just by updating brand assets. The structural shift allows Otavamedia to roll out new media brands faster and more cost-effectively.
What we did:
- Adopting full site editing & the Gutenberg editor: Empowering the editorial team with modern WordPress tools that are unified across the entire Otavamedia media family.
- Modularity: Dismantling monolithic plugins. One plugin performs one specific task (e.g., search or digital magazines) and can be shared across different titles (TM, Rakennusmaailma, Anna, etc.).
- Future-proofing: Leveraging WordPress core features instead of custom work. When WP updates, the entire ecosystem benefits without the need for expensive custom development.
- Radical database cleanup: Moving away from heavy ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) structures and migrating content directly into WordPress’s native Gutenberg structure. This operation removed hundreds of thousands of rows of redundant metadata, significantly streamlining the system.
Outperforming forecasts with results off the charts
The renewal exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. Instead of the typical post-launch dip in search engine visibility, metrics began a sharp upward trend immediately after the release. The site’s visitor numbers and page views more than doubled following the revamp – an exceptional result for an established media brand.
Performance improvements
Site-wide, the Google PageSpeed Insights Performance Score improved by a median of 53%.
The improvements in site loading speeds are primarily attributed to a more efficient caching strategy.
All figures are reported as medians, as they provide a significantly more reliable picture of the situation than mere averages.
Visitors and traffic
Figures before and after the renewal, compared across identical time periods:
Change in visitor numbers
Total visitors for Tekniikan Maailma were 947,000 before launch and 2,638,000 after launch. This means the number of visitors more than 2.5-fold. On a weekly level, the change is roughly the same.
Page views per session
Regarding page views, the number of page views per session was 2.26 before the renewal and 1.47 after. On the other hand, the total number of sessions was 2 million during the first period and 10 million during the latter.
Change in Google search traffic
Organic Google searches generated 600,000 page views before the launch and 805,000 page views after.
Google Discover changes
Google Discover generated 605,000 page views before the launch and 8.5 million page views after. The change has been most significant in Discover.
Impact on media sales and costs
The increased traffic and improved site performance have translated directly into growth in media sales, as ad viewability has improved along with faster loading speeds.
While traffic has grown, technical costs have decreased. Thanks to database optimization and a more resource-efficient architecture, server costs (AWS) were reduced by an estimated 5–10%.
When the technology was fixed, the results followed
At a strategic level, the project succeeded in validating the architectural solution: the concept has already been proven effective across two different media brands, and cross-publishing content between brands is now technically effortless. The project secured Otavamedia’s competitiveness and technical agility far into the future.
“The most important outcome is the technical software development framework, upon which we will continue to drive unification. It will pay for itself in the future.”
– Riku Österlund, Head of Design and Technology, Otavamedia
Serving as a pilot, the Tekniikan Maailma renewal paves the way for the continuation of Otavamedia’s harmonization strategy. The further development of services and the harmonization of the ecosystem will continue, with a future focus also on enhancing user journeys.
“The project was a great success. It’s rare for the focus to remain this clear throughout an entire project. The process was very transparent, and we worked hard together as one single team.”
–Riku Österlund, Head of Design and Technology, Otavamedia
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