Uniform blog/Insurance company boosts website performance and gains startup-like agility with Uniform
Insurance company boosts website performance and gains startup-like agility with Uniform
Insurance company boosts website performance and gains startup-like agility with Uniform
To attract and retain customers and support its brands, a century-old, fortune 1000 mutual insurance company relies on a robust online presence built with Sitecore’s digital experience platform (DXP), complete with internal and external websites in multiple languages. However, since a few years ago, page loads had become sluggish, and upgrades were difficult to implement.
Not only that, the sites’ Lighthouse scores ranged between 30s to 60s only, a far cry from the company’s goal of 90s. That led to a “poor” grade for Page Experience in the Search Console and fewer organic search impressions and clicks.
As a first step to improve performance, the company evaluated the feasibility of adopting Jamstack, but such a move would have required a laborious and long-drawn-out revamp of all the sites. Transitioning away from the Sitecore platform appeared to be the only viable alternative, and Uniform entered the picture.
Read the full case study.
Evaluation of Uniform
It turned out that, since the insurance company had partnered with Uniform before to optimize the Sitecore implementation, a foundation of trust and camaraderie was already in place. As a start, to gain a thorough understanding of the Uniform stack and the tools available for use, the web team undertook a thorough proof of concept with the Uniform Digital Experience Composition Platform (DXCP) and a few content management system (CMS) vendors. Assured that Uniform was the right choice, the team solicited and won approval from the company’s leadership for migration.
“Beyond sharing the advantages of Uniform, we explained the ongoing challenges of the Sitecore platform. Just making updates—like a shift to a new search engine—had become very time-consuming,” says the software development manager responsible for the sites. “We needed to switch from Sitecore, and it was clear that Uniform would be the right choice.”
A smooth and speedy transition
After signing up with Uniform, the web team proceeded to reconstruct its entire technology stack, selecting best-of-breed components, picking Next.js as their favorite front end, and putting plans in place to leverage Uniform’s personalization features and deliver through the Amazon CloudFont content delivery network (CDN). In addition, the team picked Contentful as a CMS vendor, confident that Uniform could support any choice they made.
Moving off of Sitecore sounded daunting at the outset. However, by migrating to Uniform in phases and focusing on smaller sites first, the web team was able to quickly launch its first replatformed site in about four months and spun up a second small site only two months later, speeding up deployments right away. The goal was to be completely off Sitecore in two years.
Also, thanks to the phased approach, the team gained hands-on experience on a more controlled basis while learning new technologies and new ways of using the existing ones, such as Akamai, and integrated S3 and CloudFront.
Furthermore, Uniform’s modern, flexible architecture made it a cakewalk to pivot to new tools. For example, the team used to do a lot of A/B testing with Google Optimize, which Google shut down later on. To everyone’s relief, Uniform can facilitate that testing, which could proceed with no interruptions.
Many substantial gains
Among the many gains the insurance company realized after migrating to Uniform are three major ones:
- Higher Lighthouse scores. Postmigration, the insurance company’s Lighthouse scores surged to the 90s, a huge gain that signified much faster and more compelling experiences for customers.
- Simpler workflows and significant time savings. Because Uniform offers a visual workspace for blending content, data, and technology from anywhere, the process of building and managing websites is much simpler and easier. Also, by leveraging Contentful’s excellent multilanguage features, marketers no longer need to rebuild individual pages to support multiple languages, saving weeks of translation work.
- More flexibility and freedom. The insurance company is no longer locked in to a particular set of architectural components, as was the case before with Sitecore. Instead, the composability of Uniform Digital Experience Composition Platform (DXCP)-composition clears the way to choosing best-of-need components. Now and in the future, the web team can remove or swap out components with ease.
A successful and gratifying partnership
The web team attributes the success of the migration to the excellent support from Uniform. To quote the software development manager again, “The best thing about Uniform is the people, who have shown great flexibility, vigilantly integrated our feedback, and worked hard to ensure everyone’s success.” Such appreciation epitomizes a win-win for all.
