PolicyAdvisor · Finance
PolicyAdvisor Blog
A custom WordPress blog theme with modular ACF blocks and a mega menu the editors run themselves. Core Web Vitals went from failing to green on every blog page.
PolicyAdvisor Magazine publishes insurance and personal finance news and explainers from Canadian insurance advisors. The blog is where many readers first meet the brand, and its pages were failing Google’s Core Web Vitals.
The brief
PolicyAdvisor had a new design for the blog and two goals for it: every blog page passing Core Web Vitals, and richer post layouts that editors could build without asking a developer each time. The marketing pages, built with WPBakery, had to keep working alongside it.
Our approach
We built a custom WordPress theme from scratch from their designs, in under a month. Blog posts are assembled from modular blocks made with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Flexible Content, so editors choose the pieces a story needs while the design stays consistent. For the pages that still use WPBakery, we built custom WPBakery elements in the same visual language, so the whole site reads as one product.
What we built
Modular blog blocks
- Callouts, tips and pull quotes
- Comparison tables and pros and cons
- Calculators and calls to action
- FAQs, key takeaways and summaries
A mega menu the editors run themselves
Also built on ACF Flexible Content: editors add and reorder columns and links, feature articles or calls to action inside the menu, add icons and short descriptions, and give different parts of the site their own menu content.
A lean front end
Hand-written PHP, CSS and JavaScript keep blog pages free of page-builder weight, which is what moved the speed scores.
The result
After launch, Core Web Vitals turned green on every blog page, the target the project was set up to hit. Editors publish faster from ready-made blocks, posts follow the same design rules automatically, and the team manages new layouts and the mega menu without a developer.
In the words of Pankaj Kanchankar, PolicyAdvisor’s Founder and CTO, we redesigned the structure of the entire blog, added different types of posts with their own UI treatments, and improved site speed and Google PageSpeed results. His full review is below.
Built with
- WordPress and a custom theme
- ACF Flexible Content (blog blocks and mega menu)
- Custom WPBakery elements
- PHP, JavaScript and CSS
The team is very good with WordPress. They helped us with the redesign of our entire blog structure. They created adding different types of posts and provided different UI treatments for those custom types. They worked on improving the site speed and get better Google Pagespeed results. They are highly responsive with changes and communicate well about tasks worked on.
Pankaj Kanchankar
Founder and CTO at PolicyAdvisor