DealStreetAsia
From emergency security remediation to a pioneering headless CMS platform — a technology partnership built on trust and sustained delivery.
DealStreetAsia was among our earliest engagements, beginning with a focused mandate to resolve a security issue on their site. Following a comprehensive audit and rapid remediation, we were retained as their long-term technology partner.
Significant capabilities, delivered over years of partnership
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Security Audit & Remediation
The engagement began as a targeted intervention — a focused mandate to resolve a live security issue. We conducted a comprehensive audit, identified root causes, and shipped a rapid remediation that stabilised the platform and restored confidence.
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Subscription System & Paywall
We designed and implemented a robust subscription system and paywall that effectively prevents content leakage to archive services and scraping platforms — protecting the core business model of a subscription-driven financial publisher.
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Platform Scale: 80,000+ Articles
We scaled the WordPress installation to support a live corpus of over 80,000 articles without compromising performance — a non-trivial challenge requiring careful attention to database architecture, query optimisation, and object caching strategy.
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Headless WordPress with Next.js
Ahead of the curve, we transitioned the platform from a traditional WordPress frontend to a Next.js–based architecture, using WordPress purely as a headless CMS. This was well before the approach became mainstream — a decision that significantly improved performance, flexibility, and developer experience.
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Mailchimp Integration & Daily Digests
The platform is deeply integrated with Mailchimp, enabling automated daily digests that deliver curated content to subscribers. The integration handles subscriber lifecycle management, segmentation, and delivery scheduling — keeping a demanding editorial audience consistently engaged.
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Slack Subscription Workflows
Since the operations team relies on Slack as their primary communication platform, we extended subscription management workflows directly into Slack through custom bot integrations — enabling the team to handle subscriber actions, receive alerts, and execute common tasks without leaving their workspace.
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Bot Mitigation & Edge Performance
At the scale and visibility of DealStreetAsia, the platform is a constant target for scrapers and automated abuse. We built custom bot mitigation systems using Nginx with Lua-based extensions, alongside an in-memory caching layer capable of holding the entire content corpus — ensuring resilience during traffic spikes without service degradation.
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Authenticated Admin Access via Vouch
To secure administrative access, we implemented a Vouch proxy layer that restricts entry to authenticated users via Google Workspace — adding a meaningful additional layer of protection to the WordPress admin interface and substantially reducing its exposure to credential attacks.
Managing a large WordPress platform?
Whether you're dealing with performance at scale, a security concern, or a migration to a headless architecture — we've done it in production.