Sitecore on Sitecore
In July 2024, we launched a new Sitecore.com, introducing a refreshed brand and tone of voice. Underneath the surface sits a broad digital transformation project that spans six Sitecore platforms and encompasses a fully revitalized marketecture strategy.
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Like our customers, we’re always enhancing our marketing technology stack to ensure a great experience for everyone visiting Sitecore.com. Our last major rebuild of Sitecore.com was in 2019, and while it served us well, by 2023 it was time to plan for an upgrade.
We had of course introduced multiple new platforms and functionalities since 2019, and it had given us a taste for SaaS composable platforms that allowed us to deliver exactly the capabilities our teams needed, while always innovating with new features and reducing infrastructure costs. Sitecore’s modern, SaaS cloud-native XM Cloud beckoned.
Based on our experience with SaaS platforms, we aimed to reduce maintenance costs, enjoy seamless upgrades, and stay at the cutting edge of marketing technology with XM Cloud. We also identified that performance and authoring experience were both too slow, so the team was excited about page speed and efficiency gains from this transition, as well as learning and using new technologies and frameworks.
As you’d expect, we were advanced users of Sitecore Experience Platform, and our site included:
We were also aware that the site’s design had become inconsistent, and that the information architecture was overly complex and didn’t reflect our customers’ journeys.
Therefore, our project scope had to include replacement or improvement of these capabilities, as well as a redesign and new IA.
A plan was drawn up by our Digital Experience team which would build an agile martech infrastructure to support Sitecore for years to come.
The plan was visionary but logical - the simultaneous build, rebuild or expansion of six Sitecore platforms in nine months, culminating in the relaunch of the site:
A well-structured project timeline is crucial in digital transformation as it ensures all phases are executed efficiently, minimizing delays and resource wastage.
This plan obviously required considerable buy-in from other stakeholders and teams across the business, and so while we worked with our colleagues to get all the pieces in place, we undertook a content audit which reviewed every page on the site for relevance, structure and taxonomy.
This, along with the time savings from moving our custom integrations to Connect, and using Content Hub’s transforms capability, meant that we were able to build, migrate and launch Sitecore.com in approximately four months – very fast for a site of this complexity.
As we were building internally, with additional resources from our Services team, and working with an external partner for the design, we needed our timeline to be flexible enough to deal with changes in availability and the surrounding projects.
By the time the new site build began, we had removed more than 50% of the content, and the final sitemap contained around 1700 pages – a reduction of more than 75%. The result wasn't just an easier migration but improved SEO.
cut in page load time
increased lighthouse scores
time saved per image
Our key objectives for this project were to reduce maintenance costs, improve team processes and efficiency, and build a site which is clean, connected, and ready for optimization.
The results are early but promising:
As time goes on and we get more results, we’ll be happy to share them with you – even those we miss - and what we did about it. At Sitecore, we believe that a martech company should walk the talk of digital experience, and should be transparent with their customers about their own projects. So we will continue to do that.
How have our developers found the change?
The transition to Sitecore XM Cloud and Next.js has been both challenging and rewarding for us as .NET developers. We’ve had to expand our skills in React and the JAMstack architecture, but Next.js’s intuitive syntax made this process easier to understand and align with Sitecore components. The faster development cycle and reduced build times have boosted efficiency, streamlined our workflow, and enhanced collaboration, allowing us to deliver the project more effectively.
Join Us
Join a live panel with the team behind the project to find out how we delivered all of this in under nine months. We’re excited to tell you all about it and answer your questions.
Meet us at Sitecore Symposium in Nashville, October 15 - 18 2024. We'll be presenting deep dives on the project and the platforms we built. Find out more and register today.