CUSTOMER STORY
How Uswitch Consolidated Six Content Solutions into One Visual Development Platform
Learn how this prominent price comparison company streamlined workflows, empowered SEO and Content teams, and reduced engineering overhead with Builder in just three and a half months.
Uswitch adopted Builder and saw
6 CMSs
consolidated into 1 visual development platform
93%
of the migration automated with the help of Builder APIs
Significantly faster
page creation times
Massive reduction
in engineering time dedicated to CMS-related tasks
Industry
Information Services
About Uswitch
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Builder has fundamentally changed how we ship and manage digital experiences. The ability for our designers and content teams to create and update pages independently has been a gamechanger.
— Phil Helm, Lead Software Engineer
Challenge
Heavy reliance on engineering teams bottlenecked page creation, iteration, and experimentation
As the UK’s leading comparison site for energy, broadband, and mobile services, Uswitch relies heavily on SEO and on-page optimization to attract and convert site visitors into loyal customers. Even with a headless CMS architecture, the smallest site changes often required significant developer time and effort.
Uswitch began searching for a solution that would:
- Reduce engineering dependence – The design team often wanted to experiment with new components, layouts, or designs, but they had to rely on the busy engineering team for support. The engineering team frequently had higher-priority tasks, which meant that the design team’s requests were often deprioritized in the engineering backlog. As a result, the design team’s requests often never got completed, which was not only frustrating for the team but hindered their ability to rapidly create, iterate, and optimize pages that could improve traffic from SEO pages or conversion rates.
As Phil Helm, Lead Software Engineer on the platform team, noted, “there was no way for a designer to try something different on one page or explore some new ideas. It all had to go through the way we built the components and into the CMS. We’re a busy engineering team, we didn’t have time for all of them.”
- Streamline the page-building experience – Creating pages was a slow and cumbersome process. Content marketers, designers, and SEO team members often had to guess which content model they needed, generate a live preview, and review the results for each iteration in the CMS. Even if all the components for a page were available, the lack of instant visual feedback could extend the page-building time to as long as 3 to 4 hours.
As Jenna Davies, Product Manager for the platform team, described, “the feedback we heard from the team was that the former process wasn’t very intuitive. The lack of visualization and heavy nesting meant it was complex to use and easy to get lost among all the layers.”
- Maintain high web performance – Maintaining high web performance, specifically ensuring optimal Core Web Vitals, was a top priority for Uswitch. Therefore, the CMS they chose to migrate to needed to be free of unnecessary code, heavy plugins, and inefficient design elements.
As Flora Harvey, Staff Software Engineer, stated, “before we could make any decision to migrate we had to be sure the platform would also meet our requirements around performance, especially as it relates to Core Web Vitals and SEO impact.”
After exploring several options that appeared to offer only incremental improvements rather than significant transformation, the team discovered Builder. The solution immediately stood out due to its comprehensive visual editor and seamless integration with the performance-based framework, Qwik.
There was no way for a designer to try something different on one page or explore some new ideas. It all had to go through the way we built the components and into the CMS. We’re a busy engineering team, we didn’t have time for all of them.
— Phil Helm, Lead Software Engineer
Evaluation
Uswitch conducted a thorough qualitative and quantitative CMS evaluation
Before committing to Builder, Uswitch conducted a comprehensive evaluation to ensure the platform met their rigorous standards for performance, usability, and scalability. The team executed a detailed proof of concept that included two phases:
Phase 1: Qualitative assessment. During the two-month qualitative evaluation, Uswitch engineers provided feedback on their experience implementing and building with the CMS. Meanwhile, Uswitch designers, content creators, and SEO team members shared their qualitative feedback on their onboarding experiences and how they leveraged the platform to build without engineering support.
The results of this phase demonstrated that Builder was a platform that both engineers and non-engineers could quickly pick up and leverage effectively.
Phase 2: A quantitative assessment. During the next two-month period, the Uswitch team built two existing high-traffic pages using Builder. They conducted A/B tests to determine whether there were differences in Core Web Vitals, DOM complexity, and click-through rates between the Builder-powered pages and the ones powered by the existing CMS.
From the A/B tests, the Uswitch team were able to conclude that the experiences powered by Builder met their performance requirements.
We took a methodical, multi-phased approach to evaluating Builder, running a rigorous proof of concept. The results gave us the confidence we needed to recommend moving forward with Builder.
— Jenna Davies, Product Manager
Solution
Builder Publish helped Uswitch eliminate engineering bottlenecks, ship more pages, and meet web performance goals
With qualitative feedback for Builder overwhelmingly positive, and key performance metrics tested and hitting requirements, the Uswitch team proceeded with the full migration. Three and a half months later, they had successfully migrated 2,919 full CMS pages to Builder.
A migration of this size can often be a painful and time-consuming experience, but a significant portion of the rapid migration was done programmatically. The Uswitch team created a migration script which leveraged Builder’s APIs and testing environments to automate the content migration for 93% of their pages.
Once Uswitch made the shift, they were able to:
Go from design to live without engineering effort. Uswitch designers, content marketers, and SEO team members now leverage Builder’s intuitive Visual Editor to create and test new layouts without requiring assistance from engineers. Additionally, Builder’s structured content models allowed for managing metadata, breadcrumbs, and authorship independently. This new autonomy has freed up engineers to focus exclusively on high-impact projects.
Build experiences faster. Uswitch took advantage of Builder’s real-time visual editing capabilities, including live previews and instant updates. This eliminated the need for manual testing and lengthy revisions. As a result, design, content, and SEO team members can quickly iterate on pages, make optimizations, and deploy changes confidently, leading to improved workflow efficiency and a significant reduction in the time required for each new page, iteration, or optimization.
Reduce time spent onboarding team members to the platform. Previously, the team responsible for the CMS at Uswitch spent considerable time onboarding new members to the CMS platform. With Builder, onboarding time has been dramatically reduced. Builder’s intuitive user interface has allowed the Uswitch team to replace lengthy calls with simple 'how-to' videos, taking onboarding time from hours to minutes.
Engineering isn’t a blocker to the designers anymore. They can try different things and they've got more power within the CMS to build new things and hit publish and go without it coming through our team. We're not a blocker anymore and that's just awesome.
— Phil Helm, Lead Software Engineer
Results
Uswitch now produces more pages and performs more optimizations in the same amount of time
In just three and a half months, Uswitch streamlined its content workflows, reduced reliance on engineers, and significantly cut page creation times by implementing Builder. This partnership has already produced immediate and measurable results:
6 CMSs
consolidated into 1 visual development platform
93%
of the migration automated with the help of Builder APIs
Significantly faster
page creation times
Massive reduction
in engineering time dedicated to CMS-related tasks
Looking ahead, the Uswitch team is always actively striving to get more from Builder, regularly raising new feature requests and syncing with their Customer Success Manager at Builder on how further optimisations to the platform could better meet their needs. Uswitch is also exploring ways to deepen its use of Builder — with personalization as a top priority. One key initiative on the horizon is serving different content to different customer cohorts. The team is excited to partner with Builder on the best approach to unlock this next level of customization and performance.
We don't want to be the CMS team. We're a product platform team owning lots of different capabilities that we want to spend time enhancing. Builder gives us the time to do that.
— Jenna Davies, Product Manager
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