Overview
Self-hosted Strapi v5 replaces a legacy WordPress install for a Qatari digital outlet publishing 40+ articles per day in Arabic and English. Custom locale-aware content types, a draft/review workflow with editor and publisher roles, and a Next.js frontend consuming the Strapi REST API cut publish latency from 22 min to 4 min and halve server cost.
The challenge
A monolithic WordPress setup could not handle 40 daily posts across two locales without plugin conflicts and slow admin. SEO was hampered by rendered HTML that Google could not cache efficiently. The editorial team needed role-based review before publish, which WordPress roles did not support cleanly in Arabic-right-to-left context.
The solution
We self-hosted Strapi v5 with a custom Article content type that carries both ar and en locale slots, a Cloudinary media upload plugin, and a three-stage draft→review→published lifecycle. The open-source Strapi codebase was extended with a Qatari news-ticker widget and a scheduled-publish cron hook. The Next.js frontend uses ISR at 60-second intervals, giving near-real-time freshness without full SSR cost.
Outcomes
Article publish latency reduced from 22 to 4 minutes
Server infrastructure cost cut by 50%
Organic search traffic grew 88% in 3 months
Editorial errors requiring retraction dropped from 9 to 0 per month
Key metrics
Tech stack
Services
Client testimonial
“Our Arabic editorial team spent half their day fighting WordPress. Now they publish four times faster and the site finally ranks.”
— Tariq Al-Subaie, Editor-in-Chief — Sada Media
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