Iceland Review: Editorial Platform Rebuild
Iceland's leading English-language news portal and travel adviser, rebuilt on WordPress with ad revenue treated as a core requirement from day one, not bolted on afterward.
Results & Metrics
Outcomes from a full rebuild focused on speed, discoverability, and editorial workflow.
5.44M impressions at an 11.1 average position: real, sustained organic visibility for a niche Iceland-focused publication, not a one-off spike.
1.55K clicks from the Discover feed alone, including a single-day spike past 300 clicks when a story caught on.
1.22K clicks at a 3.2% CTR, with the News surface keeping time-sensitive stories visible while they're still relevant.
Every page loads in under 2 seconds on mobile, even with ad units in play. Speed and ad viewability were solved together, not at each other's expense.
A Newsroom Built Around Its Ad Revenue
Iceland Review is Iceland’s leading English-language news portal and travel adviser. It’s part daily news for readers following the country, part travel guidance for visitors planning a trip. Almost all of its income comes from display advertising, so this rebuild couldn’t treat ad placements as an afterthought. They needed to be part of the layout from day one.
We rebuilt the platform on a custom WordPress theme with Advanced Ads managing every placement: banner units the editorial team can position and swap without touching a line of template code, sized to stay visible and viewable (which is what actually drives ad revenue) without slowing the site down or burying the articles underneath them.
Around that ad infrastructure, we restructured navigation for the site’s two real audiences: News for readers following Iceland day to day, and Travel for visitors planning ahead. We also cleared years of accumulated technical SEO debt and set up an ongoing webmaster relationship that’s still running today.
Real Search Console data over the past 3 months:
A Site That Pays for Itself
Every page loads fast, ranks well, and keeps its ad placements visible without crowding out the reader. The revenue model and the reading experience were never treated as a trade-off.
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