Doubling go-to-market speeds with Dojo

• Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
• Technology Stack: React, NodeJS, Astro

As one of the biggest card payment providers in the UK for SMEs and enterprises, Dojo (opens in a new window) is every dream come true in helping customers accept card payments, trade securely, and get paid fast. The brand is also spearheading its way into new markets, such as Spain, Italy, and Ireland.

With their focus on the hospitality industry and a fast-growing client base, Dojo’s previous CMS could not keep up with their need to scale. Switching to Storyblok fast-tracked Dojo’s runway to scale into new markets, giving both marketers and developers faster time to market. The result? Decreased website loading times, extended web sessions, and happy, engaged customers all around!

Tap-and-go success with headless

Dojo serves all of its customer-facing websites through Storyblok (dojo.tech with all its locales, dojo.app, and dojo.careers). They were able to achieve:

• Easy onboarding: Less-experienced CMS editors can build a page from start to finish in just 15 minutes! On their previous system, this would have easily taken 45 minutes.
• Simple migrations through Atomic Design principles: Moving over to Storyblok was simple as pages are stored in an atomic (tree) structure, where each page is represented with the URL, pages/components have strong schemas, and pages can be built from a list of components. The headless nature of Storyblok also allows Dojo to use whatever frontend technology they like, meaning they wouldn’t need to nominate one of the pods to host the CMS UI/back office.
• A CMS that’s made for everyone: From Web PM, SEO, Content Managers, Digital designers, digital copywriters, and brand managers, there’s something for everyone from building, managing, and optimizing content to general web, SEO, and CRO management, content audits, and design quality assurances.
• Cost savings that equal happiness: Security and ops teams fear not with 5-figure cost savings of not having to support Windows virtual machines and improved security scores with Storyblok’s ISO 27001 (opens in a new window)!
• Post-migration success: Dojo’s seen winnings with a 66% increase in web sessions YoY, an increased website domain authority from 43 to 45, and improvements in site speed that make Google’s Lighthouse scores shine bright.
• You speak, I speak: With direct integration with Lokalise (opens in a new window), Dojo speaks their customers’ language with easy translations to manage and launch seamlessly across 3 new markets with minimal effort.

Swift features to success

• Workflows & Discussions: Users can come in at the right time with Workflows when needed to make sure content and campaigns are launched with ease. They can also collaborate using Discussions to leave comments directly on items that need to be updated or are ready to go.
• Visual Editor: For new CMS learners, onboarding is straightforward with the help of the Visual Editor to get up to speed and manage content in no more than 15 minutes.
• Releases: Teams can easily make a content audit, and make changes all in one go to publish seamlessly.

Unpacking the challenges with legacy

Before Storyblok, Dojo was using Umbraco as a CMS. As they were using an older Umbraco version, the front end of the site was very much tied to the technology that the system used (ASP.NET and Windows). As a result, they had three servers running the front end, one of which was also the back office. Dojo needed rules to prevent the CMS’s UI and URLs from being accessible outside of the business, becoming a security risk. Dojo also faced:

• Difficulty in managing and shipping content quickly to scale.
• A tricky editor experience that was very slow, with editors taking up the majority of the time trying to figure out the system.
• Challenging image management within the system.
• Manual heavy-lifting on simple updates to content structures and schemas, risky Umbraco and ASP.NET upgrades that potentially could cause other breaking changes, and maintaining downtime if any changes were bigger.
• Time-consuming builds for the Engineering team to ship new components and custom options.
• Heavy reliance on developers to make simple updates and changes with marketing daily, creating bottlenecks for the engineering team repeatedly and hindering time to market.
• Scalability and internationalization were severely lacking - it didn’t make sense to build from scratch for each new market.
• A lack of a best-of-breed approach to integrating internationalization tools.

Dojo also desired to reduce the number of Windows virtual servers and required the ability to use more modern frameworks such as React, NodeJS, and Astro. Since the business was also growing, there was an urgent need for more content and customizable web solutions to shorten editing and go-to-market times with their content teams. Their next system needed to be user-friendly with an easy onboarding experience while being made for modern technologies to scale.

Since switching to Storyblok, the team can now build and deploy components in a single day, ready for content teams to start using - a process that used to take multiple days within a sprint. The team also migrated all of their website content in just four and a half months from ASP.NET to Astro and React This involved over 600 pages, based on around 175 content types and blocks. As a result, Dojo has doubled its speed to market, making it easier than ever to scale and expand into new markets.