For a growing company whose legacy websites were limiting the businesses’ ability to be adaptable, it was time to re-platform. Their websites were not mobile friendly, featured inconsistent brand elements, provided a slow customer experience, and did not comply with Federal accessibility standard requirements.

However, it quickly became clear that installing the default Sitecore platform would negatively impact performance and lead to high Azure consumption costs with high developer dependency due to the scale of their portfolio of websites.

So, we took a different approach to modernization.

At Build With Assembly, our approach to this complex application modernization solution challenge was rooted in a holistic understanding. Our first step was to get the client team to adopt a product mindset instead of a project-based approach. This enabled product owners to prioritize high value features, while empowering them to address real-time feedback with a sense of ownership over what was being built, rather than defaulting to a “follow the plan” approach.

From there, a dedicated team of high performing, certified Sitecore specialists was seamlessly integrated into our “one-team” philosophy. One team sharing full accountability and project governance to ensure complete visibility on all team-aligned deliverables.

We developed an incremental roadmap that allowed us to realize value quickly and scale efficiently, with a cross-functional pod of developers, cloud engineers, design and QA specialists. PO approvals out of each sprint, coupled with automated testing, code versioning, and a continuous deployment of the applications with a capable application DevOps pipeline. Because this was an application modernization project, we adopted a strangler pattern and released incremental capabilities seamlessly at the end of every sprint, instead of a prescriptive “Big-Bang” approach where you wait until everything is finished before releasing all at once.

The resulting team-aligned solution was to create a Modern User Interface through frontend development with React single-page-applications using Sitecore’s JSS. The websites were rendered on the server using server-side-rendering aligned to SEO best practices, and stored in Akamai CDN, allowing for origin offloading and geographical distribution and scaling.

A major benefit of this solution included the ability to repurpose common UX/UI components across their website portfolio to maintain consistent branding, greatly reducing development efforts while still allowing the ability to retheme and make individual website adjustments as needed. It also enabled independent scaling by segmenting websites based on traffic and availability, optimizing cloud usage to further reduce cost and increase website performance.

Rebuilding our client’s website portfolio on Azure Cloud had a major impact on their bottom line, their teams’ performance, and the customer experience. Consumption costs were reduced by $50,000 per month. Their internal content teams we’re able to independently publish new web pages faster, achieving an astounding 97% decrease in lead time. In turn, this optimized developer workflow, decreasing their effort by over 90%. Website load times dropped from an average of 7 seconds down to 2.1 seconds.

This optimized developer workflow, decreasing their effort by over 90%.

But the greatest impact came from the experience and skills gained by the client through our integrated team approach - strengthening their internal capabilities and setting them up for future growth and success.