Storyblok powers up Electra’s website in 2 months

• Headquarters: Paris, France
• Technology Stack: Gatsby, Typescript, Tailwind, Mapbox

Electra is a French company specializing in fast charging for electric vehicles. They aim to make electric mobility accessible, affordable, and enjoyable. The company does so by removing the barriers to adopting electric cars by deploying the most efficient network of fast-charging stations in Europe.

Continuing to embark on their development journey, Electra wanted to convey a brand experience through their website, showcasing their brand, mission, and message to their different target audiences. So, they partnered with Pelostudio, a digital agency based in Paris, who introduced them to Storyblok. Within only 2 months, Electra gained a future-proof and scalable website and managed to go live with their content in 6 languages. According to their plans, the website also gained an excellent 100% SEO Google performance ratio.

Fueled but not far enough

The company aimed to make their website beautiful and well-designed and communicate effectively. Yet, they faced several challenges with their previous website, which was running on an in-house, outdated Content Management System (CMS):

• Outdated solution: The website was static, slow, and difficult to manage. Most of the time, it required code changes to update content. This meant that marketers and content creators depended on developers at work.
• Problems with translation: They used an external tool to deploy new languages, and most of the work for translation was done manually outside their CMS. This led to cumbersome localization work, which was time-consuming and ineffective.
• Not SEO-friendly: The website was not optimized regarding the SEO Google performance, which was a big deal for Electra. The company aimed to be flexible in the SEO-adjusted content modeling, which required a proper CMS solution.
• Scalability issues: Electra had brave plans to build new landing pages for acquisition and other purposes. As an expanding brand, they needed a CMS that would allow them to scale their website.
• Technology limitations: Electra's website faced performance and speed issues. They were caused by an inability to put in place future-proof technologies. Also, this was holding them back from their ambitious plans. They aimed to add extraordinary features to their platform.

Recharging Electra's batteries with Storyblok

During the first discussion about changing the CMS for Electra, Pelostudio immediately brought Storyblok to the table. Before, the company used Contentful for their blog, but they wanted an ultimate CMS solution for the whole website. Pelostudio already had experience with Storyblok and knew it was worth opting for. They saw an extraordinary potential in it to make Electra shine.

• Storyblok is easy to use for both the marketing and the developers. Thanks to this, Electra's marketers got independent from the coding-pain. They can edit content and upload images thanks to the Visual Editor and asset manager. Moreover, they gained the ability to create pages with drag-and-drop components. Furthermore, they can work according to Storyblok's easy-to-manage internal structures.
• Pelostudio took advantage of Storyblok's built-in Field-level translations. It allowed the creation and storing of multi-language content on the entry's field level. Once they had it translated and added to their design tabs, publishing the new language version was quite easy. Today, Electra's website is live in 6 languages.
• Storyblok is compatible with any tech stack, so it fits into Electra's technology vision 100%. It allowed their marketers to create optimized websites that are fast to load and perform well. Moreover, it sped up the website's deployment process - it took only 2 months for the new Electra website to go live.
• With the CMS, the company was able to move forward with one of their core features, which is Electra's interactive charging map. Because Storyblok is fully compatible with an API architecture, the feature could be built based on the Mapbox API.
• Electra's team was delighted with Storyblok's flexibility in the SEO structure. Now, they can build whatever SEO structure they want, keeping in mind their future client-oriented landing pages.

Charging through Europe

On their Storyblok-based website, Electra offers a charging stations map. It's one of their most astonishing and innovative features. Thanks to this, the company can showcase the expansion of their network in the EU in order to be the leader on the market. The map lets us view the Electra charging network growing fast in Europe. We can also see how much power is available at each charging point. Pelostudio developed the map by taking advantage of Storyblok's API-first architecture. It's built with the same stack as the website and connected to Mapbox API. They integrated the data they wanted to display on the map with the product information on the website.

Electrifying the future together

Today, Electra's developers team adopted Storyblok as the foundation of their website. Their marketing team loves using it to develop the website further. Currently, Pelostudio and Electra keep working together on some of the website's elements, improving the performance of the videos and overall visual quality. Additionally, Pelostudio is still improving the website and adding more languages to the Electra community. This will make it even more recognizable as the first choice for European electric charging.