Publisher Website Relaunch Case Study: The Daily Upside

The Daily Upside is a fast-growing media startup covering business and investing. They have over one million subscribers and publish original reporting with a strong editorial bar. When they came to Refact, they were in a tight spot. Budget was limited, the product was not scaling, and the launch date was close. They needed a small team that could move fast without breaking what already worked.

Challenges

The Daily Upside wanted to launch a new website, but their in-house team struggled to manage the process. Their editorial setup also created extra work for writers. They had to publish the same story in their CMS, then publish it again in their emailing platform.

As we reviewed the stack and analytics, we found another issue, a major bot attack that was disrupting onboarding and polluting subscriber data. For a publisher, that kind of noise can hurt reporting, growth decisions, and conversion tracking. This is a common problem we see in web development for publishers when traffic spikes but protections do not keep up.

“[Refact] played a big part in making sure everything was tailored to our needs … they ensured our marketing was unaffected by the relaunch. After the launch, we saw a boost in terms of the overall conversion rate.”

Patrick Trousdale, The Daily Upside

Solutions

We stepped in with a two-part plan. First, we used a partial-service approach to control cost. We worked alongside their design team to ship clear UI and UX that supported subscription conversion. We also made sure the new platform could handle growth without becoming fragile or slow.

Second, we built a simple way to automate publishing workflows across platforms. That removed duplicate posting and gave the writers time back. We also tightened onboarding defenses to reduce bot signups and protect the data the team relies on.

“… the whole technical team were at hand… If we needed to go direct to someone, it felt like they were always there…

Patrick Trousdale, The Daily Upside

Our Ongoing Partnership

The result was a new site launch that stayed within budget, reduced editorial friction, and cut down bot-driven noise. The Daily Upside kept marketing performance steady through the relaunch and saw conversion lift after launch.

If you are planning a website relaunch and need to protect conversions while fixing the underlying workflow, we can help. Talk with Refact about your timeline, constraints, and what “done” needs to look like.