Omroep WNL

WNL has seen steady growth in recent years with new TV formats, podcasts, and a stronger presence on Instagram and TikTok. Reaching a broader audience comes with higher demands on the technology behind the scenes. The outdated WordPress platform could no longer support those ambitions, so the broadcaster chose to migrate its website to Statamic, a modern CMS that delivers speed, flexibility, and scalability, preparing WNL for the next phase of digital journalism.

The result is an interactive online platform where news, opinion, and video come together seamlessly. In this case study, you’ll read about WNL’s migration from WordPress to Statamic.

The old situation

When the WNL platform was set up around 2017, the broadcaster chose WordPress as the CMS. At the time the most widely used CMS, thanks to its low barrier to entry, large community, and countless plugins. Within this environment, three core content types were managed: articles (news and in-depth stories), programmes (broadcasts with catch-up links and additional information), and people (presenters, guests, and experts).

Need for a modern, interactive platform

In recent years, WNL has undergone strong digital growth: WNL.tv attracted an increasing number of visitors, and the Instagram channels of Goedemorgen Nederland and Stand van Nederland built an ever-growing audience. At the same time, the media landscape has shifted toward short-form online video, podcasts, and interactive features such as polls and live reactions.

To support peak traffic, multimedia streams, and cross-platform distribution, WNL needed ultra-fast infrastructure that can scale easily, enable real-time publishing, and integrate seamlessly with its social, audio, and video channels. In short, WNL required a modern, modular, performance-driven digital foundation to sustain that growth and unlock new forms of journalistic interaction.

Choosing Statamic

We recommended Statamic based on our experience with projects such as Volt Europe and because we are a certified Statamic implementation partner. The platform aligns with WNL’s ambitions for speed, scalability, and new formats. Its flexible content model, with collections, blueprints, and fieldsets, fits closely with day-to-day editorial workflows. The control panel provides fast previews, version control, and clear permission management. Built on Laravel, Statamic makes integrations with services such as NPO ID, video, and social channels straightforward, and avoids reliance on heavyweight plugins, benefiting performance during peak traffic.

WNL agreed after we demonstrated that new formats like Shorts, polls, and thematic Dossiers can be built without detours, and that publications go live noticeably faster thanks to a reliable preview. Combined with lower operational overhead and a future-proof architecture, Statamic offered exactly the modern, modular foundation WNL needed for the next phase of digital journalism.

Migration of existing content

The first step in the migration to Statamic was to safely transfer nearly 50,000 article, programme, and people pages from the old WordPress system. It was crucial not only to move the content itself, but also to preserve the underlying structure, media assets, and references.

To achieve this, Swen developed a custom migration process. First, he mapped all content structures in WordPress to their equivalents in Statamic. Only once that one-to-one mapping was fully correct were the posts imported in batches and automatically migrated into the new system.

Finally, the editorial team carried out a last round of checks to fine-tune the details. Thanks to the largely automated approach, all content was ready in the new CMS on time and without errors.

Faster, more interactive, and more accessible

Once the migration approach was in place, we could start further developing WNL’s platform. We introduced, among other things, Shorts: ultra-short videos that play directly in the feed. We also added interactive elements such as polls, quotes, reactions, and a full comments section, linked to NPO ID for secure login. For in-depth topics, we created an entirely new content type: Dossiers. Stand van Nederland was the first example, this format brings together long reads, video, statistics, and social embeds on one clear, structured page. Existing articles were also enhanced with smart blocks for related content (such as popular Shorts or background stories).

A key part of modernising WNL’s digital platform was improving accessibility in line with WCAG guidelines. Visitors can now adjust text size to their preference and even have articles read aloud, an option we implemented in collaboration with Tolkie.

The result

WNL’s new platform proved to be a major success right from the start: organic traffic grew by over 38%. The migration to the much faster Statamic platform, combined with a carefully executed SEO strategy, clearly paid off. Even we didn’t expect the performance improvements to make such a big impact so quickly.

The platform also remains stable during peak moments, even when live broadcasts and articles attract thousands of visitors simultaneously. Editors praise the new workflow: “articles go live within minutes, with the live preview function.” And users are enthusiastically making use of the new polls and commenting options. In short, the new Statamic platform delivers exactly the speed, interactivity, and scalability WNL was looking for, both internally and externally.