Viinilehti
Viinilehti.fi is an online wine magazine in Finland, offering in-depth articles, expert reviews, wine recommendations, subscription plans, and curated wine experiences. The platform also includes an eCommerce store with tasting boxes and wine club memberships.
With a growing digital audience and an evolving content strategy, Viinilehti needed a complete website overhaul that balanced editorial storytelling with eCommerce functionality and a modern, seamless user experience. Pennine Technolabs team was brought on board to handle the design, development, and optimization of the new digital experience.
Business Challenges
The project wanted an editorial richness and digital commerce to harmonize under a strong technical strategy.
- Outdated Website Platform: The original website was built on an old CMS with poor performance, which affected the page loading speed, security and SEO rankings. Integrating modern functionalities was almost impossible without a complete redevelopment.
- Ecommerce complexity: Viinilehti connects editorial articles, alcohol recommendations and ecommerce in the same ecosystem. It was challenging to balance a fluid, smooth experience with the flow of the transaction, especially for mobile users.
- Poor backend: Their content editor struggled with a fixed and poor backend system. Content updates, multimedia uploads, and scheduling articles require technical assistance, reducing publication agility.
- Mobile Responsive Issues: A large portion of the Viinilehti audience accessed the site via mobile. However, the previous layout broke styles, had an unreadable font size and made navigation hard on the small screen.
- SEO and Performance Limits: Despite high-quality content, the site was underperforming in organic discovery due to the structured schema, poor core web vitals and non-face media handling.
- Membership management interval: Viinilehti offered membership-based products, but the user account handling, auto-renewals and safe payment gateways lacked proper integration. This created friction in customer travel and affected the conversion rates.
- Inefficient Service & Wine Mapping: Due to dynamic filtering, classification and lack of wine pairing logic, users cannot easily discover wine based on taste profiles, opportunities or dishes.
Solutions
With improved performance, a scalable backend, and a rich mobile experience, Viinilehti is now well-positioned to expand its content footprint and grow subscription-based revenue.
- Modern CMS: We migrated Viinilehti to a custom WordPress solution with Elementor Pro and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which enables flexibility for its content team while maintaining strong page performance.
- Ecommerce Integration: Using the content for the store and a headless architecture for WooCommerce, we created a smooth transition between reading an article and buying recommended wine. We manufactured dynamic product blocks, which can be embedded inside articles to increase conversion.
- Tailored Backend Dashboard: We have designed a custom dashboard experience for non-technical editors with modular templates, media library enhancements and drag-and-drop widgets. This significantly reduced their dependence on developers for everyday updates.
- Mobile-first redesign: The entire site was re-designed with a mobile-first approach, using a fluid grid system, sticky navigation and swipe-friendly gallery. This improved the period of the session and reduced the rise rate by more than 30%.
- Technical SEO and Performance Adaptation: We applied lazy loading, the WebP image format and Redis caching. JSON-LL Schema was added to articles, products and reviews. The site scored a 90+ score on Google PageSpeed Insights Post-Launch.
- Advanced membership operations: We integrated the Woo-Commerce membership with Stripe and clarna, allowing users to manage their billing, purchase a subscription and use gaudic member content through a safe login.
- Wine mapping and filtering: We developed a custom taxonomy for alcohol types, tastes, regions and pairs. A guided filter helps users to search for wine through the kind of food, flavour profile or seasonal opportunity- Userster and increase the site from time to time.
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Project in Figures
Applied Technologies
React
WordPress
Elementor
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