Her Campus Media is the No. 1 portfolio of Generation Z media brands. Founded 15 years ago by three Harvard University undergrads, and with chapters at hundreds of college campuses, Her Campus Media is devoted to telling stories important to their Gen Z audience.
Today the Her Campus Media portfolio includes three major websites that receive millions of monthly visits: HerCampus.com, the leading media platform dedicated to college women, SpoonUniversity.com, where pop culture and food news meet; and CollegeFashionista.com, the premier community empowering college students to harness their love for all things fashion and beauty.
The Her Campus Media websites are powered by college journalists covering both national and local content. Campus chapters operate at over 300 colleges worldwide, with each chapter operating its own localized site unique to their college or university.
Her Campus Media’s flagship brand Her Campus was launched with its founding in 2009, and it then acquired College Fashionista and Spoon University both in 2019. As Her Campus Media acquired those additional brands, they found themselves managing and running three disparate tech stacks.
Facing looming upgrades and additional required investments to keep all three running well, they decided to standardize on WordPress VIP and Parse.ly as a common set of technologies across all three. Doing so meant they could drive additional traffic, improve site performance and reliability, and innovate faster.
Key results
- 120% year-over-year increase in organic pageviews
- ~90% reduction in development overhead
- Reduced complexity through standardization
- Improved reliability
- Increased usage of data
- Better able to serve core mission
The challenge
Three CMS solutions, each with their own unique technical needs
As Her Campus Media grew both organically and through acquisition, they accumulated a series of disparate technologies. The flagship Her Campus property was originally built using Drupal hosted on Acquia, CollegeFashionista using WordPress hosted on WP Engine and Spoon University was a custom Ruby on Rails application with a Node.js front end running on Digital Ocean. There was no commonality between the three architectures or hosting providers.
David Lievense, Director of Product Engineering and IT at Her Campus Media, was responsible for all three. “I was brought in to bring sanity to our infrastructure,” he said. “Maintaining three separate systems wasn’t efficient and all three faced challenges.”
Her Campus faced an impending deadline with Drupal 7’s end-of-life. “Drupal had been a good platform for us for 10-plus years,” said Lievense. “But it didn’t fit where we were as a small, dynamic organization that wanted to publish and iterate quickly and leverage a massive community of thousands of developers. Our original plan was to move to Drupal 8, but that would require a full site rebuild. Eventually, we asked ourselves, ‘Are we doing that because Drupal is the right platform or are we doing that because that’s what we’ve always done?’”
College Fashionista worked well on WordPress but began experiencing challenges with their hosting platform, WP Engine.
“WP Engine’s level of support once worked for us, but as our platforms grew, we needed a platform and customer support that would evolve with the changing needs of our organization.”
—David Lievense
Spoon University’s custom application was well-liked by staff and highly tailored to the needs of editors and college writers. However, it was expensive to maintain and taxed Her Campus’s lean engineering team. “The maintenance level and complexity of doing anything was significantly higher,” said Lievense.
“One example was with our old Ruby on Rails application—as best practices around SEO changed, we had to constantly update that component. Because Google is constantly updating [their ranking methodology], whatever we had in place went out of date. But with WordPress we can trust that the best of breed plugins will be doing that development for us.”
The solution
A common infrastructure for growth
WordPress as the unified CMS
After evaluating whether to adopt their custom application to all three properties, Her Campus Media chose WordPress as their solution.
“We’re never going to build an engineering team to match not only core WordPress Core with its many developers who contribute to every new release, but also the tens of thousands working on plugins, add-ons, and other technologies.”
—David Lievense
“While we did consider Drupal, their plugin community and number of plugins available for Drupal are so much smaller,” said Lievense.
The massive WordPress ecosystem of solutions helped Her Campus Media move faster while controlling costs. “WordPress helps my team punch above their weight,” said Lievense. “Now we can take a plugin that does 90% of what I need—I just need to handle the other 10% that’s custom to us. The WordPress architecture enables us to deliver just the right experience for our unique needs without building from scratch.”
At the same time, Her Campus Media wanted to prioritize and improve the editorial experience with consumer-grade usability. “These are students accustomed to using top-of-the-line, easy-to-use, beautiful, responsive applications,” said Lievense.
“Drupal always had this old feeling to it. The fact WordPress had moved to a modern block-based editing experience was an opportunity for us to adopt content creation tools that matched the expectations of our writers.”
Improving content strategy
Her Campus Media was also expanding their content strategy to be even more data-driven, an initiative spearheaded by VP, Content Rosanne Salvatore when she joined the company in 2022. As part of that initiative, Her Campus Media began using Parse.ly, a part of WordPress VIP, to get better content analytics into the hands of their editors and writers.
“Using insights both in real time and historically is the best way to make a content strategy.”
—Rosanne Salvatore
“We need to look at where traffic is coming from, to which content, and why. Every editor needs to use this data all day, every day—it’s a huge part of our editorial strategy. Meanwhile, many of the students in our chapters want to pursue careers in media. I want them to learn why these metrics are important and how to use them throughout their careers,” said Salvatore.
But Google Analytics struggled to provide the right insights to the right people. “My national editors are Gen Z,” said Salvatore. “They hadn’t been working with GA as long as I had. It was difficult for them to pull out the stats they needed. I had worked with Parse.ly before and its data visualization and user experience is much better and easier to figure out.”
Her Campus Media’s investment in Parse.ly proved prescient when Google retired Universal Analytics in favor of Google Analytics 4. “When the switch to GA4 happened, even as an engineer, I couldn’t get the data to be consistent,” said Lievense. “Universal Analytics would give one set of numbers and GA4 another. We couldn’t trust the data. And the whole point of analytics is trusting the numbers and having a complete view of our websites.”
As Her Campus Media continued to grow, the organization was eager to integrate an elevated data tool into its data strategy, Parse.ly offered a path forward. “Once we switched to Parse.ly then we were able to easily pull website analytics from multiple platforms and determine any outliers. In every case, Parse.ly provided us with the most accurate, reliable data.”
Doubling down with WordPress VIP
Based on their experience with Parse.ly and evaluation of technical capabilities, Her Campus Media decided to standardize on WordPress VIP as the hosting platform for their WordPress instances, with Parse.ly serving as their content analytics solution. Together, the unified solution would form the backbone of their three major digital properties.
“It really was about trust,” said Lievense. “What WordPress VIP gives you is the trust that these people know they’re doing, understand the WordPress ecosystem deeply, and empower content creation.
“Our traffic isn’t constant and we have major events that bring traffic spikes. The combination of WordPress VIP’s dynamic scaling and their support made them a smart partner.”
—David Lievense
With the impending Drupal 7 end-of-life, Her Campus was first to be built out with a new theme and necessary plugins to meet their workflow. They worked with WordPress VIP technology partner The Code Company on the implementation and migration from Drupal. Both Her Campus and Spoon University have similar hierarchies, structures, and workflows across campus-based chapters, national writers, and full-time staff. That meant Spoon University could leverage work done for Her Campus.
Her Campus Media worked with WordPress VIP agency partner 10up on their migration for the Spoon University site. Finally, the College Fashionista implementation was the simplest of the three, moving from their WordPress setup on WP Engine to WordPress VIP.
Driving traffic through a unified SEO approach
Organic traffic is a key driver for Her Campus Media. But effective search engine optimization (SEO) requires changes to both content and site performance. And in some cases these need to happen in tandem. To achieve maximum results, Lievense and Salvatore conduct monthly meetings where they align to drive improvement.
Data from Parse.ly Analytics provided a roadmap for content improvement. But things really started picking up when WordPress VIP became the core platform, said Lievense. “One of the reasons for our traffic increase is Google sees our site as so much faster than what it was on our previous platforms. We’re not getting dinged for negative metrics in Core Web Vitals.”
“Partnering with a best-of-breed company like WordPress VIP lets us fight with bigger, better resourced companies for eyeballs.”
—David Lievense
Her Campus Media is able to adopt best practices without extensive development work. Take Spoon University’s recipes. To be featured in online carousels and served as rich text results, Google requires data to be formatted in very specific ways. Using WordPress plugins, Her Campus Media no longer has to build this functionality and suffer the impacts if they fall behind keeping up with Google’s changes.
After moving to WordPress VIP and using Parse.ly to improve their content strategy, Her Campus saw a 120% year-over-year increase in organic search pageviews.
“With the combination of WordPress and Parse.ly, we’re seeing traffic growth unheard of in the industry.”
—Rosanne Salvatore
