Case Study - Rebuilding blog.clover.com for a modern Clover brand
Clover turned to me to replatform their blog experience, modernize the brand system, and cut page load times for merchants discovering their POS platform.
- Client
- Clover
- Year
- Service
- Technical Consulting & Engineering
Overview
In 2015 Clover needed a faster, more flexible home for their editorial team. The existing WordPress install powering blog.clover.com depended on a dated theme, hard-coded layouts, and a single shared deploy pipeline that frequently broke during product launches. They asked me to step in as an engineering partner to modernize the experience without disrupting their content calendar.
What I built
- New component system – I introduced a React/Pattern Lab inspired component library rendered through a headless WordPress API, which let writers mix and match layouts without pulling engineers into every post.
- Static publishing pipeline – The site now exports to static HTML via a Node/Handlebars build, deploys through CloudFront, and keeps authoring inside WordPress. That change alone improved time-to-first-byte by more than half.
- Editorial tooling – Built custom preview endpoints, image optimization helpers, and real-time linting so the Clover marketing team could publish in minutes instead of days.
Impact
Clover’s team reported a 62% drop in average page weight and a 40% improvement in load time across key geographies. Most importantly, the redesign gave the brand team space to evolve Clover’s storytelling—from feature launches to merchant profiles—without custom code for every campaign. The platform we shipped in 2015 stayed in production for several years with only minimal maintenance.