Ninja Van
Ninja Van's business blogs are how the Southeast Asian logistics giant reaches the online sellers who ship with it. When the blogs became slow and unstable, we steadied them, rebuilt them around the reader, and rolled one design out across four markets.
A website care rescue that grew into a full redesign of Ninja Van's business blogs, launched in the Philippines and Indonesia and rolled out across four markets.
The Challenge
What we were solving
Ninja Van is one of Southeast Asia's biggest logistics companies, delivering parcels across six markets for close to two million shippers. Most of those shippers are small online sellers, and the company's regional business blogs are how it reaches them: guides on starting an e-commerce store, branding, marketing and selling on the big marketplaces, with every article feeding readers towards a "ship with us" enquiry.
To be clear about scope: Chillybin did not build ninjavan.co. Our brief was the blogs, and for a business built on SME sellers, the blogs were not a side project. They were a lead channel with their own content teams in each country.
They were also struggling. When we audited the Philippines blog in July 2021, the homepage carried 6MB of images, took over 15 seconds to fully load, and ran 15 outdated plugins with no caching and no child theme. Development tools had been left installed on the live site, including a file manager plugin that was an open security risk. The Indonesian blog (Ninja Xpress, on blog.ninjaxpress.co) had the same problems. Behind the scenes, the editors found the WordPress backend a chore, and the Mailchimp integration that fed their subscriber list kept breaking.
Success meant two things: blogs fast and stable enough for teams publishing daily across multiple countries, and a design that treated the content like the business asset it was.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Stabilise before you redesign
The first engagement was website care, not design. We optimised images, added caching and performance tuning through WP Rocket, removed the leftover development plugins, hardened the WordPress install and brought the plugin stack up to date on both blogs. Alongside that ran the unglamorous rhythm of a care plan for a big publisher: monitoring broken links across hundreds of articles, fixing subscription emails, and working through change requests with Ninja Van's content leads in Manila and Jakarta each fortnight.
That year of steady work is what earned the bigger project. When Ninja Van decided the blogs needed a proper rebuild, they already knew who they wanted to do it.
Redesign around the seller, not the slider
The rebuild kicked off in December 2021. The old design led with heavy image sliders that slowed every page and buried the content, so they went first. In their place, key articles surfaced on the homepage, and we worked with Ninja Van's team to recategorise the entire back catalogue around the seller's journey: Beginner SMEs, Established SMEs, Successful Entrepreneurs. Category archives gained breadcrumbs and subtopics so readers could actually browse, not just land and leave.
Article pages got the most attention, because that is where the audience lives. A table of contents follows the reader down the page, related articles from the same category sit at the end, and a site-wide search module means a seller looking for "packaging" finds it. Gravity Forms took over form handling and the Mailchimp integration was rebuilt so the marketing team could trust their own list again.
The platform was WordPress with Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer, running on Ninja Van's own infrastructure with their IT team handling hosting (a normal condition of working inside a company this size, and one the build had to respect).
Build once, roll out four times
Because the design was template-driven rather than page-by-page, it could travel. The Philippines blog and the Indonesian Ninja Xpress blog launched together in July 2022, and the same solution was then rolled out to Thailand and Malaysia. One design system, four markets, each run by its own local content team.
The Solution
What we delivered
Ninja Van's blogs went from a liability (slow, insecure, hard to publish on) to a publishing platform that regional teams ran day in, day out. The seller-journey categories we mapped with their team in 2022 still organise the Philippines blog today, years and hundreds of articles later.
There is a quieter outcome too. Working as an external WordPress partner inside a logistics unicorn, alongside internal IT and country content teams, is its own reference: clear handover documentation, defined maintenance ownership, and a build the client's own people could operate without us on speed dial.
What we learned
Big brands rarely start with the big project. Ninja Van began as a care client with a slow blog; the redesign came after a year of audits, fixes and fortnightly requests handled well. The lesson is to treat small engagements as auditions, because that is what they are.
Multi-market platforms reward template thinking. Every decision in the Philippines build (category logic, archive layout, the article template) was made knowing Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia would inherit it. Designing one blog four times would have been faster to start and far more expensive to finish.
And when a client hosts their own site, the handover is part of the product. The owner's manual, maintenance schedule and named responsibilities we shipped with the launch mattered as much as the templates, because Ninja Van's teams, not ours, would live in that CMS every day.
