Digital transformation through headless architecture for an enterprise SaaS provider
Planday’s marketing team was looking for a partner to migrate the outdated WordPress platform to the modern headless stack.
Market
Denmark
Industry
SaaS
Service
Migration to headless
They acted like a true growth partner. Invested in our success.
Frederic Linfjärd
Director of Growth, Planday
About Planday
Planday is an enterprise SaaS company that offers an innovative global workforce management application. Planday’s solution helps build an employee schedule faster by taking into account staff vacation, availability, payroll costs, and more.
Powered by a community of local industry experts, Planday provides a best-in-class digital platform that is easy to use, accurate, secure, and compliant with local needs and standards. From payroll and accounting to POS and reporting, its open API and tech ecosystem is scalable to fit shifting business needs and to build an engaged, flexible workforce.
About the challenge
Planday’s marketing team was heavily limited by an outdated WordPress implementation that stifled innovation and required a substantial maintenance effort. As with any large-scale WordPress website the team was relying on many plugins and extensions that often conflicted with each other. This greatly contributed to the complexity of performing any website updates and made version upgrades a very complicated task. Any site update required developer intervention and took approximately 15 minutes to deploy. As a result, the marketing team was completely reliant on the in-house software development team.
Main problems
Unstructured content and data duplicates
Localization and translation issues
Poor performance and security vulnerabilities
Main challenges before migration:
- Unstructured content and data duplicates: The website's content was scattered and lacked a coherent structure, making it difficult for users to navigate and find relevant information. Redundant data entries led to confusion and inconsistent information architecture. Multiple versions of the same components existed and led to inconsistencies across the site.
- Localization and translation issues: Being a truly global organization Planday had a website that supported multiple languages. Unfortunately, due to the various limitations of the plugin used for localization, the team ended up having different versions of the site for each language making maintenance a nightmare. The site would often jump between different language locales, confusing users and making it difficult for the marketing team to analyze website traffic data.
- Poor performance and security vulnerabilities: The website's functionality has been impacted by a multitude of bugs, causing delays in implementing required changes. Additionally, frequent crashes have prevented necessary updates from taking place. Slow load times and laggy interactions hampered user experience and resulted in a very low Core Web Vitals score. The website had also insecure methods of IP/location verification that made it open to some serious security vulnerabilities.
As a result of the aforementioned issues, Planday's marketing team has encountered significant challenges, including:
- Long and complex content creation process.
- Heavy reliance on in-house developers to make even the simplest modifications.
- Integration issues with third-party systems, such as CRM and analytical tools.
This had a negative impact on the entire customer journey and forced Planday’s team to search for a new reliable software development partner.
The solution
The Blazity team started by conducting a comprehensive audit that included not only the functionality of the current solution but also, through a series of workshops and interviews with key stakeholders, the entire content creation process.
Blazity’s experts decided to redesign the entire data architecture of the website and develop a new front end from scratch using a completely new technology stack. The team recommended a migration to a headless architecture, utilizing the powerful Next.js framework for the front end and Builder.io as a content management system (CMS).
Empowering Planday’s marketing team with the freedom to create
A key element of the transformation was the adoption of Builder.io as a content management system (CMS). Builder.io is a headless CMS system widely recognized for its state-of-the-art visual editor that enables marketing teams to freely create and manage content without the need to engage developers teams. The system also supports advanced content personalization features, enabling Planday marketers to precisely personalize their message and conduct various A/B testing scenarios. What is also important, using Builder.io allowed the team to merge all different language versions into a single application which not only reduced the costs of maintaining multiple website versions but also greatly improved UX consistency.
Building a highly performant front end with Next.js
To ensure the website’s performance, the Blazity experts decided to rebuild the website using Next.js. Trusted by industry giants like the Washington Post, Uber, and Netflix, this framework guarantees lightning-fast loading times and impeccable technical SEO results. During that process, the team merged many co-existing duplicated UI components and removed obsolete modules that significantly improved the overall website performance. Also, implementing an automatic update policy significantly reduced website deployment time, as it no longer required rebuilding the entire site after content changes.
Seamless integration with third-party systems and advanced analytics
Another key priority was integrating the website with multiple third-party systems. Several integrations were implemented including Hubspot CRM, Dreamdata, and Calendly among others. Blazity’s team redesigned all core integrations using server-side implementations that interoperated with third-party APIs. This approach provided unprecedented control over data transmission, ensuring impeccable data quality. Moreover, it has perfectly adapted to GDPR and CCPA compliance by reducing frontend JavaScript and making the site resistant to add blocking. The team has also implemented a comprehensive analytical setup based on GA4 and adjusted it to the requirements of the headless architecture to ensure conversions and events are accurately captured at the right moments.
Technology stack
Collaboration time
1 year and still ongoing
Services provided
- Workshops, system architecture
- Next.js frontend development
- Streamlined localization and translation process
- 3rd party integrations and analytics
Blazity completed the project on time, meeting expectations. They improved the website’s performance and made it easier to operate and develop, which unlocked growth opportunities.
Frederic Linfjärd
Director of Growth, Planday
Results
The migration from the outdated WordPress platform to the modern headless stack was a resounding success. Planday now boasts a website that not only offers a superior user experience but also simplifies backend processes for the team. This strategic move has positioned the company for greater success in the digital realm, ensuring it remains at the forefront of its industry.
Reduction in reliance on in-house developer teams
5x increase in website’s performance
Centralized and simplified localization process
Significantly reduced deployment time
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