Overcoming legacy challenges
As the "front door" of Sitecore, a global leader in digital experience software, our website must exemplify the best in digital experience. The last rebuild of Sitecore.com was in 2019 and the intervening years had left us with design and tech debt, which slowed down the experience for visitors as well as our editors and developers. Our navigation was complex and lacked clear journeys, there were more than 7,000 pages in the CMS that needed to be cleaned up, inefficient processes and workflows were wasting time, and language translations were cumbersome and costly.
To support our growth and align with our corporate strategy, we transitioned to a fully composable, SaaS martech stack. This required assessing usage and replacing the extensive capabilities of Experience Platform (XP), finding solutions to replace our existing integrations, image storage and optimization practices, and securely storing customer and behavioral analytics to leverage for personalization.
Speed and a new information architecture were crucial for the rebuild, and XM Cloud was the perfect scalable, high-performing solution.
Building a best practice, composable architecture
The new Sitecore.com martech stack was designed to replace and extend our existing capabilities while delivering speed, performance, and efficiency. At its core is content management with XM Cloud, hosted on Vercel with Next.js.
We collaborated with Sitecore platinum partner Hugo & Cat on the site's design and information architecture, as part of the larger rebrand of Sitecore in 2024. With over 60 JSON renderings and nearly 2,000 pages, the site was rebuilt in just 16 weeks by leveraging the efficiencies found in the supporting platforms:
- Sitecore Content Hub DAM for media storage and optimization, utilizing image "Transforms," AI-powered "Smart Crop," and automatically generated .webp public links to deliver perfectly optimized images at all sizes with just a couple of clicks
- Sitecore Connect enabled robust integrations and automation across platforms, transitioning custom integrations that required enormous upkeep to no-code recipes in just days
- Sitecore Search was used for onsite search, recommendations, and listing pages, saving time in the build and providing automatically updated and personalized “next steps” components across the site, increasing time on site and pages viewed
- Sitecore CDP & Personalize to collate analytics and drive personalization, enhancing user engagement by mapping user behaviour to our Salesforce CRM data securely using Sitecore Connect.
XM Cloud's headless architecture, combined with the globally distributed CDN of Vercel and Sitecore’s Experience Edge, delivered page data much faster than our old XP architecture which slashed page load times by up to 80%. Our development team focused on speed and optimization, refining every component, script, image, video, animation, and file against PageSpeed Lighthouse scores, resulting in a doubling or even tripling of these SEO-crucial scores for key pages. Finally, a custom-built integration with Microsoft Azure AI Machine Translation supported translation of the full site into three languages at a fraction of the previous cost.
Our new design is clear and clean, with fewer design elements on the page. A pre-build content audit reduced content by 74%, giving us a cleaner list of pages to migrate. Collaboration was key to the project’s success: all development, editing, and migration work was done by our own DX Team with support from Sitecore Services and our colleagues throughout Sitecore.
Efficient, secure, fast, and ready for the future
The new Sitecore.com on XM Cloud is fast, clean, and connected, with significant improvements in performance and user experience. Lightning-fast page loads have greatly enhanced our SEO strategy and site engagement, and we are now moving some of our sub-sites like Sitecore Symposium onto this architecture.
Our developers are saving time with connected or container mode, and our editors are more productive thanks to the re-organized editing experience, and our Content Hub DAM integration delivers perfectly optimized images at all sizes, saving over an hour per image and improving productivity for multiple teams, We are now expanding our DAM-powered Sitecore Asset Library to replace our sales enablement platform.
Connect securely and efficiently handles our integrations and automations, and we are expanding its usage across the enterprise. Customer Data Platform is capturing behavioural analytics and matching them to our customer data, and we are delivering account-based personalization using Personalize. We are currently building our reporting dashboards in PowerBI to drive even more optimization.
We are ready for scalable artificial intelligence and other next-gen tools, and we are now onboarding onto Sitecore Stream. Our custom-built integration with Microsoft Azure AI Machine Translation supports translation into three languages, quickly and cost-effectively.
Our goal was to build the fastest XM Cloud website in the world, and the best B2B Saas technology website in the world. We believe we have achieved that. Visit our Sitecore on Sitecore page to learn more about the project and see how we plan to maintain the leading edge.
See what’s possible with Sitecore