Challenge
Argus Media, a global leader providing independent energy and commodity market intelligence,
wanted to update the design of their website from both a user experience and brand perspective. In part driven by a wider corporate rebrand, they were keen to get this new experience to market quickly and capitalise on their current market opportunity. For Argus it was about time to value.
Sitecore customers are now largely aware of XM Cloud, the (relatively) new fully managed SaaS based headless CMS. A demonstration of XM Cloud had impressed the team at Argus, but time was of the essence and a full migration at this point would have taken longer than desired.
The challenge was therefore how to deliver a refreshed digital experience that represented their global leadership position, and generate more enquiries and conversions, within a few months. However, with the benefits of SaaS and composability obvious, could they deliver the required value in the short terms and at the same time step towards a SaaS and composable future.
Solution
A full migration to XM Cloud would involve significant refactoring of the existing Sitecore backend as well as the new headless frontend build. Codehouse were able to apply an iterative approach delivering the benefits associated with a redesign and headless frontend quickly, with the rebuild of the backend and full migration to XM Cloud taking place later and, from their customers’ perspective, quietly in the background.
Another challenge of moving straight to XM Cloud was the use of Solr for search. XM Cloud also requires the migration of the search platform, whereas this approach meant we could reuse the existing Solr setup.
Some prerequisites were installing SXA and setting up the new Sitecore IA accordingly, and installing Headless Services (previously call the "JSS" module).
From a rapid development perspective, making use of SXA, meant faster development of renderings and their variants. Using off the shelf SXA features such as redirects saved effort and NextJS provided many features and configuration options out of the box which reduced what previously required more manual effort.
From a step-by-step perspective it's entirely possible to install SXA and Headless Services onto XP and build a NextJS head application in tandem with an existing MVC monolith. For Argus, our next step toward XM Cloud will be to modify the existing NextJS + XP setup to use Sitecore Search and retire Solr. Once that's done, a switch to XM Cloud will simply be a migration of the Sitecore IA and pointing the head app at the Sitecore Edge endpoint.
Results
Argus Media's new modernised front end not only looks great, but also has lightning-fast performance, improving SEO and the numbers of visitors, whilst also delighting these visitors once they arrive on the site.
At a time of their choosing, the migration to XM Cloud can take place, allowing Argus to see the benefits of the new 'Pages' visual content editor and automatic updates and upgrades.
Following its launch, the new website has achieved extremely positive results, including:
· Total visits and sessions increase by 128%
· 77.9% increase in organic traffic source
· Over 90% increased engagement across the site including over 300% more search engagement
· A fast and reliable site in line with the refreshed Argus’ brand
The overall feedback has been fantastic.
