We were looking for a Content Management System to support our ongoing growth across Parcel2Go’s digital platforms.

In collaboration with AND Digital, we chose Contentful to better enable us to create, manage and distribute content, while also providing new avenues for collaboration and scalability.

As the UK's largest courier comparison site, our team is a technology led business, previously listed as one of the Sunday Times Tech Track fastest growing tech companies. We arranged the delivery of 11 million parcels in 2022 alone.

 

Why Contentful?

 

 

Managing and maintaining the business content had become challenging as we grew and the amount of content updates increased rapidly. We identified a need for a modern, scalable solution.

We needed a solution that would put the power to create, edit and publish key content in the hands of the team closest to the information. With full access and no complex architecture, our desire was to be in full control of information that our internal teams needed to share and customers would benefit from accessing.

Contentful was chosen as the tool that would best match the business needs today and be scalable for future plans. What stood out about Contentful in particular was the platform's:

• Unlimited API calls
• Intuitive page building
• Webhooks
• SEO integration and pricing structure
• Included ongoing support

 

How We Decided on Contentful

With continued growth expected, the project team at Parcel2Go brought in AND Digital to review and analyse a number of CMS providers. We prioritised key factors such as:

• Unlimited API requests
• High bandwidth
• Recovery options
• 24/7 support

AND Digital undertook a deep analysis of potential solutions with Minimum Viable Product (MVP) criteria in mind. A panel made up of Commercial, Technology & Marketing teams was assembled to look across the potential benefits and drawbacks of each solution and the impact across each area of expertise - together we knew we could reach a balanced choice.

 

P2G’s Director of Marketing Larisha McGurty commented:

"We recognised the need to upgrade our in-house CMS system to accommodate our growing business demands. Contentful emerged as the ideal solution, offering the necessary technical capabilities while ensuring future scalability. With the implementation of Contentful as our new CMS, we can now effortlessly create landing pages on demand, eliminating the need to involve our development teams and reducing backlog delays. This empowers us to enhance our on-site content and advertising initiatives independently, enabling our developers to focus on more intricate technical endeavours."

 

Benefits of Contentful for Parcel2Go

Since launching, Parcel2Go has migrated over 70 pages and created a new business-driven process for creating content - distributing and publishing faster than before.

This takes the admin and support burden away from our tech teams, enabling them to focus on activities that help to innovate our offerings and generate additional revenue.

 

Karl Hadwen, our Front End Team Lead, stated:

"The introduction of the Contentful CMS has proven transformative for our front-end team, empowering them to concentrate their efforts on refining existing components and creating new ones. This shift has also allowed them to prioritise performance optimisation for each page, a critical factor given the pivotal role SEO plays for our pages. With our focus now on performance, we've ensured our tech stack's robustness and longevity.

Our CMS's implementation has also liberated resources, enabling us to delegate team members to other units to enhance their front-end skills and foster cross-team collaboration. This allocation of expertise has strengthened our commitment to building a resilient, future-proof technical stack. The interplay of these components contributes significantly to positioning us optimally for continued success in the years to come.”

 

Delivering this project was a different experience for the team at P2G. Having undergone a significant transformation of their ways of working, it was the first time the team at P2G delivered end-to-end solutions using new practices and methodologies based around ScrumBan and value focussed project prioritisation.

 

Larisha was kind enough to share her views on the project:

“Collaborating closely with our development teams during the implementation of the Contentful CMS platform was a truly rewarding experience. As we scoped the project and gained insights through testing and hands-on experience, our blended P2G & AND Digital teams demonstrated exceptional agility. They swiftly adapted to evolving requirements, enabling us to successfully deliver all the essential elements. Their dedication and flexibility played a pivotal role in ensuring that our project goals were met effectively and efficiently.”

 

Nicola Horner (Product Analyst at AND Digital) worked on the project from the initial discovery through to implementation and shared her views.

“It was important that the business could see the long term value of the new content platform. The technological potential of Contentful to support the customer’s needs into the future across their digital landscapes enabled us to enhance the use of content in conjunction with the optimisation of customer experiences across the website.

As a Product Owner, working with the technology team to enable and deploy a new content platform has been a dream! Translating all of P2G requirements, forming a roadmap/MVP and seeing major differences to ‘design’, ‘performance’ and ‘functionality’ that the business can use without the reliance on technical teams to make changes has been truly transformational!

It has been a massive collaborative effort. From adopting new ways of agile working to running discovery sessions on capabilities and how they are manifested into functionality, is a beauty to behold. All this could not have been done without a well-run agile ship of ceremonies such as ‘Refinement’, ‘Planning’, ‘Stand ups’ and ‘Retrospectives’. This has meant that business and technology teams have grown to understand and redefine responsibilities and accountability. A lot of hard work has been put into orchestrating these changes and every day has been full of exciting challenges, but that is the pure delight of being a Product Owner. Everything you do is with the customer in mind and balancing that with business needs. A win/win indeed!”

 

How We Use Contentful

In constructing the new tech stack, the AND Digital & P2G teams initiated the process from scratch, meticulously incorporating new components into Storybook (using React as our library of choice).

Throughout this entire process, the team has incorporated an approach where they work alongside the design team so that both the developers and designers can work together on components.

The team adopted a hybrid rendering strategy to grant marketing and business stakeholders the convenience of effortless page creation and management. Right from inception, everyone prioritised reusability and user-friendliness as our primary objectives.

 

 

To meet these goals, the project team chose a strategic approach that enabled development of a compact, yet effective, Next.js application. This was assigned the dual responsibility of handling routing and rendering tasks for pages/components. Our objective with this model was to negate the necessity for developer involvement in page management.

The nimble Next.js application has successfully powered the creation of over 70 pages, all stemming from a single page within our Next.js app. This dynamic route, which draws information directly from the CMS, epitomises our vision for efficient and streamlined tech infrastructure.

Throughout this journey, the AND Digital project lead nurtured a close-knit alliance with Parcel2Go’s Design and Marketing teams, fostering a shared vision of architectural elegance and functional efficiency.

To support us in understanding how we approach constructing with components, AND Digital initiated a series of learning sessions. These sessions have played an instrumental role in embedding a 'building-block' mindset, essential for component-based development, across our teams. This holistic educational approach has not only helped with Parcel2Go's understanding of the new system but also promoted a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.