The problem
Faire is a YC-backed wholesale marketplace with a massive footprint in retail and tech, and they needed a blog and community hub, guides, community stories, educational content, that matched the polish of the rest of their brand experience instead of feeling like a bolted-on afterthought. The default WordPress search returned results from across the entire site, cluttering results with anything but the actual blog content visitors were looking for.
What I built
A learning hub on a custom child theme, built to spec
Working from designs delivered by Faire's own in-house team, I built the landing page, category listings, and single blog post layout on a custom WordPress child theme, translating their design into a fully responsive, high-performance frontend with precise attention to responsive behavior.
Search that only searches the blog
I overhauled the default WordPress search and replaced it with a scoped search bar that returns results from the blog section only, so visitors looking for community content aren't wading through unrelated pages to find it.
Performance tuned to Faire's standards
I optimized stylesheets, deferred non-critical scripts, and improved image handling to push the site into the 85+ PageSpeed range, and restructured the slider code for better stability and smoother transitions.
Related content and editorial tooling
I built custom meta fields for the editorial team and a related content box that dynamically surfaces articles from the same category on every post, improving retention and discoverability without manual curation. Email newsletter signup runs through Gravity Forms.
What actually changed
| What changed | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Search | Site-wide, cluttered | Scoped to blog content only |
| PageSpeed | Baseline | 85+ |
| Content management | Static | Custom meta fields, reusable components |
| Reader retention | No related content | Related content modules on every post |