Elastic’s Move to Contentstack from WordPress Speeds up Development Process by over 500%

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As soon as Sylvie Shimizu started her new role as Webmaster at Elastic, she knew the content management system needed an overhaul. The existing process with WordPress was clumsy, slow and had a tendency to crash. There was no functional staging area and the production site ran on a completely different system, so once edits were complete, all the steps had to be repeated on the production server. Because Elastic had two domains, that meant Shimizu had to effectively perform each step four times every time she needed to publish content. With just three months to merge the .com and .org sites, Shimizu was already under a tight deadline. With any system other than Contentstack, this process would have easily taken six to nine months to complete. Additionally, the company was looking to move away from using the web production agency that had been responsible for its themes and updates in the past. The agency was slow to make necessary changes and their developers weren’t experienced enough to make the process run smoothly. Elastic had to wait anywhere from a few days to several weeks for changes, and were often told the features and integrations they wanted were impossible, which Shimizu knew wasn’t true. She had experience using a variety of different content management systems over the years and had discovered Contentstack previously. She knew it could scale with the company’s needs, that its implementation would be lightning fast, and that it was intuitive enough for content managers to jump in without any training sessions.

Elastic provides real-time insights and makes data usable for developers and enterprises. They power the world’s leading mobile, social, consumer, and business applications. Elastic was in the midst of merging its .com and .org domains when its new webmaster turned to the pioneering headless CMS Contentstack. Today, Elastic’s 100+ content managers can focus all their attention on developing great content. The company operates in the computer software industry and has a size of 201-500 employees.

Elastic was up and running in Contentstack within three months. WordPress and other CMS solutions require hours to get new users up and running, but with Contentstack, little training is required. Members of the team are able to easily navigate the platform, thanks to the intuitive and visual interface. Shimizu hired Contentstack’s services to manage the migration from WordPress. Integrating with Built.io Flow’s integration platform, Elastic successfully automated the creation and deployment of its documentation guide, which allowed Elastic to push documentation content to production, staging, and development as needed. Contentstack helped Elastic achieve three goals: 1. Swapped out an inefficient staging process for a simple, one-step system that’s completely integrated and ready at a moment’s notice. New pages now take minutes or hours, not weeks or months. 2. Removed dependency on third-party template developers. The Elastic team can now keep development moving and create new pages by relying entirely on its existing staff. 3. Created greater flexibility, while at the same time making it easier to add, alter and remove content. Contentstack’s interface provides the flexibility needed and is so easy that new users can instantly use it with little training.

• Now that Elastic is using Contentstack, onboarding time is essentially zero. New content managers can jump right in without a lengthy training process, so Elastic no longer needs to pay an expensive agency to handle the development side.
• The publishing bottleneck has disappeared, too, since Elastic no longer has to go through an agency to make changes. In their old system, creating a new page could easily take three weeks; now it takes a third of that time, which has allowed Elastic to complete three major redesigns in the last year and a half.
• Elastic has more than doubled the page views at a fraction of the cost and can now dream up and implement big web projects without limitations.

• Development costs reduced to 1/5th compared to WordPress.
• Development process sped up by 500%.
• Onboarding and training time reduced to 0 hours.