Faire is a well-known, YC-backed wholesale marketplace headquartered in the U.S. With a massive footprint in retail and tech, they needed a clean, fast, and scalable blog and community hub to match the rest of their brand experience.
My role was to develop their learning center — a space dedicated to guides, community stories, and educational content — entirely on WordPress, using a custom child theme built to spec. The design was delivered by their in-house team, and I translated it into a fully responsive, high-performance frontend experience.
Objectives
- Build a standalone blog and community learning hub on WordPress
- Develop custom layouts for the landing page, category listings, and single blog posts
- Improve site speed and SEO performance
- Limit the search scope to blog content only
- Enhance editor usability with custom meta fields and reusable components
- Implement email newsletter signup via Gravity Forms
- Add custom related content modules and post sliders
Approach
I built the community hub on top of a custom child theme, extending its functionality with a tailored WordPress setup optimized for publishing. The landing page, category page, and single post layout were all developed to match Faire’s brand guidelines with precise attention to responsive behavior and performance.
To improve search UX, I overhauled the default WordPress search and implemented a scoped search bar that only returns articles from the blog section, avoiding clutter from unrelated pages.
Performance was a priority — I optimized stylesheets, deferred non-critical scripts, and improved image handling to push the site into the 85+ PageSpeed score range. I also restructured the slider code for better stability and smoother transitions.
For easier content management, I implemented custom meta fields, and created a related content box on each post page that dynamically displays articles from the same category — improving user retention and discoverability.
Results
- A fast, clean, and scalable blog hub that aligns with Faire’s brand voice
- Scoped search functionality focused solely on community content
- Modular content layout with reusable backend components for the editorial team
- Improved performance with a PageSpeed score above 85+
- Stronger internal linking and reader retention via related content modules
The result is a blog platform that not only looks polished but performs like an integral part of Faire’s massive product ecosystem — intuitive, fast, and built to scale.