Forbes Italia
Headless editorial platform · 2024–25 edition
- Role
- Technical Lead · architecture & delivery
- Period
- 2023 – 2025 · a two-year journey
- Stack
- Next.js · Laravel · Headless WordPress · dedicated services
- Client
- Forbes Italia · IDI Group
(01) Context
Forbes Italia is one of the highest-traffic business news sites in Italy. Its legacy WordPress monolith had reached its limits: performance, editorial workflows and the ambition to bring AI into the newsroom all pointed to a rebuild.
(02) Challenge
Replatform a site that cannot afford downtime or SEO regressions, keep a newsroom of dozens of editors productive through the transition, and leave room for AI features that didn't exist yet when the architecture was drawn.
(03) Approach
I designed a headless architecture: WordPress kept as the editorial backend the newsroom already knew, a Laravel service layer in between, and a Next.js frontend built for Core Web Vitals and SEO. Around it, a constellation of dedicated services for the data side. I led the delivery team through the migration and owned the architecture end to end.
(04) One platform, many products
Forbes.it is more than a stream of articles. The same stack serves the news verticals (Business, Money, Innovation, Lifestyle), the data-driven rankings Forbes is known for (Under 30, the billionaire lists), BrandVoice hubs for corporate content, plus events coverage, video and podcasts. Each of those means dedicated templates, its own editorial workflow and its own SEO constraints, all rendered by a single frontend.
(05) AI, and everything around it
On top of the core we integrated a long list of services, some AI-driven and some not: what the newsroom needs to publish at pace, and what readers need to find, read and follow a story. The AI parts were designed to assist editors rather than replace them, and like all good infrastructure they stay invisible when they work.
(06) Outcome
The switch happened without interrupting publishing and without sacrificing search positions: legacy URLs kept resolving and the newsroom kept working through the transition. What went live is a single codebase serving the entire Forbes catalogue at scale, fast enough to hold its Core Web Vitals when a story breaks and modular enough to absorb features nobody had specced when the architecture was drawn. Millions of readers went through it as the site's 2024–25 edition.
This case study covers the 2024–25 edition of forbes.it, which I architected and led. The site has since moved on to its next redesign, as high-traffic editorial platforms do.