Ninja Van
Ninja Van's business blogs are how the Southeast Asian logistics company reaches the online sellers who ship with it, and they'd become 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.
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 a store, branding and selling on the big marketplaces, each one feeding readers towards a “ship with us” enquiry.
Chillybin didn’t build ninjavan.co. Our brief was the blogs, and they weren’t a side project. They were a lead channel with their own content team 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audited the Philippines blog in July 2021, the homepage carried 6MB of images, took over 15 seconds to load, and ran 15 outdated plugins with no caching and no child theme. Development tools had been left on the live site, including a file manager plugin that was an open security risk. The Indonesian blog had the same problems. Editors found the backend a chore and the Mailchimp integration kept breaking.
How we tackled it
Stabilise before you redesign
The first engagement was website care, not design. We optimised images, added caching, removed the leftover development plugins, hardened the WordPress install and brought the plugin stack up to date on both blogs. Alongside that ran the care plan itself: monitoring broken links across hundreds of articles, fixing subscription emails, and working through change requests with the content leads in Manila and Jakarta.
That year of work earned the bigger project. When Ninja Van decided the blogs needed a rebuild, they already knew who they wanted.
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. Key articles surfaced on the homepage instead, and we worked with Ninja Van’s team to recategorise the back catalogue around the seller’s journey: Beginner SMEs, Established SMEs, Successful Entrepreneurs. Archives gained breadcrumbs and subtopics so readers could browse.
Article pages got the most attention. A table of contents follows the reader down the page, related articles sit at the end, and site-wide search means a seller looking for “packaging” finds it. We rebuilt the Mailchimp integration so the marketing team could trust its own list again.
Build once, roll out four times
The platform was WordPress with Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer, hosted by Ninja Van’s own IT team. Because the design was template-driven rather than page-by-page, it could travel. The Philippines and Indonesian blogs launched together in July 2022, and the same build then went to Thailand and Malaysia. One design system, four markets, each run by its own local content team.
What we delivered
Ninja Van now has blogs that regional teams run day in, day out, in place of a slow, insecure platform that was hard to publish on. The seller-journey categories we mapped with their team in 2022 still organise the Philippines blog today, years and hundreds of articles later.
Working as an external WordPress partner inside a company this size, 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 change requests handled well. Small engagements are auditions.
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.
They delivered exactly what we needed, accommodated our requests with ease, and ensured everything was launched on time.
