Building a CMS platform to support future growth

From necessity to innovation: How a CMS overhaul sparked digital transformation

The air travel industry is relentlessly competitive, so an outstanding website user experience can make a significant difference in attracting and converting customers. To keep pace with its competitors, this leading airline faced an urgent challenge: its content management system (CMS), which underpinned its website, was no longer supported by the vendor.

A migration to a modern CMS was essential, but it also presented an opportunity for the airline to rethink its approach to content and digital presence. The aim was to treat content as a strategic asset that could serve numerous channels. This led the airline to adopt a headless CMS, which uses a modern approach by decoupling content storage (backend) from its presentation layer (frontend). This enables content to be efficiently distributed across multiple platforms, such as websites, mobile apps, and other digital channels.

However, migrating to a headless CMS was a massive undertaking that involved rebuilding around 8,000 web pages across 21 language markets. So, the airline turned to its longstanding digital partner, Thoughtworks, to navigate this ambitious transformation.

Challenge: Starting with a blank slate

Because the headless CMS would act as a repository for content that could be used in multiple channels, it didn’t include the out-of-the-box functionality of a traditional CMS, such as content previews. As part of our long-running engagement with the client, Thoughtworks needed to define the entire structure of the new platform and create the missing functionality to support the website rebuild, including custom web publishing tools.

Rebuilding 8,000 pages, including those for language markets, such as Japan, that have unique content structures, was a complex challenge across design, migration and technical implementation. To succeed, the team had to help the airline transition away from its rigid release processes and content management practices and adopt a modern approach.

Solution: Pioneering modern digital practices

Thoughtworks led the design, architecture and build of the new website platform by introducing modern engineering approaches and practices, including:

• Adopting a product mindset: We approached the new platform as a continuously evolving product rather than a one-off project, breaking it down into manageable chunks to deliver iteratively. This enabled us to continually learn and adapt to overcome emerging challenges and meet new requirements.

• Championing agile and DevOps: The team pioneered the adoption of flexible release rules and modern delivery practices at the airline. The shift from monthly releases to weekly deployments accelerated lead time for changes and helped the team achieve high Engineering Effectiveness and Business Outcome (EEBO) metrics.

• Prioritizing quality and collaboration: To ensure high quality and stable migration, we implemented extensive automated testing, including a script that could validate 4,000 pages in just 2-3 hours. We also fostered close cross-functional collaboration within the blended Thoughtworks and in-house team, as well as with third-party partners, helping us quickly overcome challenges in such a complex migration.

By working together using modern practices, we were able to shape the headless CMS architecture, determining how to store data, manage content components and integrate the CMS with the custom-built ‘head’ — the new website. The team also architected and built an array of essential web publishing tools, including a sophisticated content preview system and flexible page-editing capabilities, giving content editors greater control over layout and design.

Outcome: A stable, scalable platform for future growth

With its new headless CMS and website in place, the airline now has a platform that can provide an enhanced user experience today and grow to support future needs.

Average page load times have decreased dramatically from 12.5 seconds to 7 seconds, enhancing the web experience. And because the platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it provides greater stability during spikes in traffic, using AWS auto-scaling to handle peaks in demand that would previously lead to crashes and lost revenue. By moving away from its legacy CMS hosting model onto dedicated AWS infrastructure, the airline has also achieved significant server cost savings.

Although the primary driver for the replatforming was a necessary migration, the project encompassed much more than just replacing outdated technology.

Upskilling in-house teams with modern development practices has created a new, quality-focused culture and enabled much faster time-to-market for future updates and new features. The custom-built CMS has also empowered the airline’s content and marketing teams, making it much easier and faster for them to create and update the critical content required for driving sales.

Perhaps most importantly, the new platform provides the foundations for future innovation. The component-based architecture gives the airline the flexibility to create more personalized and targeted user experiences by combining content from the headless CMS with marketing platforms, user data and membership information. This architecture also enables content to serve multiple channels beyond the website, such as the airline’s mobile app, email marketing systems and even in-flight entertainment systems.