PrepBenchmark

Problem

An affiliate business has to earn a reader's trust with useful, well organised content before asking for a click, and the WordPress prototype could not model the exam domain.

System

One Laravel application: a Filament CMS for the editorial team and a server rendered public site, with certifications, exam levels, providers and provider course levels as separate relationships.

Outcome

Live at prepbenchmark.com with scored provider reviews across CFA, FRM and CAIA, CPA in progress, filters that cannot contradict, and relevance ranked search.

PrepBenchmark reviews and ranks the prep providers that finance candidates buy before sitting the CFA, FRM and CAIA exams, with CPA coverage in progress. The business runs on affiliate revenue, and that set the whole engineering brief: the site has to earn a reader's trust with useful, well organised content long before it asks anyone to click through to a provider.

It began as a WordPress prototype. I rebuilt it as a Laravel application so the exam domain could be modelled properly instead of bent into posts and categories, and so the editorial team could work inside an admin shaped around their content.

An editorial team works inside Filament; readers get a fast, crawlable public site. Everything the editors touch lives in Filament: providers, scored reviews, articles, taxonomies and media, with the article editor built on Filament's Tiptap based rich editor.

Deployment is a scripted tarball over SSH to shared cPanel hosting, the honest fit for a content site at this stage rather than infrastructure that bills for headroom nobody is using yet.

Testing it took under an hour. That is the habit the whole engagement ran on: surface the tradeoff or the inconsistency before building against it, rather than guessing and invoicing the guess.

A reader studying for CFA meets four things that sound like one: the certification, its own levels (CFA Level I to III, FRM Part I and Part II), the prep provider, and the provider's course levels, which do not line up with the exam's levels at all.

1. HP.01

   Filters narrowed on the server

   The level dropdown offers only the levels of the selected certification. Choose FRM and the options become FRM Part I and FRM Part II, so a reader can never land on a silently empty page.

2. HP.02

   Search ranked by field

   A title match outranks an excerpt match, which outranks a body match, through a weighted SQL CASE expression rather than a FULLTEXT index or an external search service.

3. HP.03

   Three dates

   Articles carry when they went live, when they were last fact checked, and when they last changed. The page labels whichever of reviewed or updated is most recent, so the two never blur.

Filtered archive URLs canonicalise back to their base page, so filter combinations never become a wall of near duplicate pages. Archives carry BreadcrumbList and ItemList structured data, articles carry Article and BreadcrumbList, and the sitemap lists real content rather than the filter space.

Email runs on AWS SES for both transactional and marketing mail, with bounce handling, a confirmed unsubscribe flow and reCAPTCHA v3 on every public form.

The platform is live at prepbenchmark.com. Before this work the client had no working article platform, no search and no way to filter by certification or exam level. All of it now runs in production, along with review, ranking and comparison surfaces per certification and an email system that went from nonexistent to automated.

The remaining work is editorial: deeper written verdicts, the published methodology and the head to head comparisons sit on surfaces that are already built and waiting on the client's content.

They wait for the first feature that actually needs the distinction, then charge interest. And estimating from documentation would have put a price on work that was already done.