Energy Planets Redesign

Energy Planets covers oil, gas and power markets across Nigeria and the broader African energy sector. When they came to us the site had over 1,300 articles and a theme that was making life difficult for everyone. Slow load times. No way to filter by region or commodity. No price data on the homepage. The content team had outgrown the infrastructure by a significant margin.

We rebuilt the whole thing.

The theme runs on Underscores with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js, on PHP 8.2. No page builders, nothing inherited from a parent theme. ACF Pro handles all content modelling: article metadata, commodity classifications, regional tagging, all structured and editable without touching code.

Two new custom taxonomies went in: Region and Commodity. Every article in the archive can now be filtered by geography, West Africa, OPEC, global markets, and by commodity type, crude oil, natural gas, and power. Editors can actually navigate 1,300 articles. Before this build, they couldn’t.

The commodity price ticker was the most technically interesting part of the project. Live prices for Brent crude, WTI, natural gas and Nigerian benchmarks running across the header on every page, the kind of thing you’d see on oilprice.com. For an energy publication, it’s not a nice-to-have.

Migration was done via WordPress’s native WXR export rather than a full database transfer, which kept the risk low. All 1,300-plus articles came across with metadata, categories and author attribution intact. The domain stayed live the whole time.

Stack: WordPress · PHP 8.2 · Tailwind CSS · Alpine.js · ACF Pro · WXR migration