Revolutionizing Financial Lending: How Liberty Cuts Development Time by 50%

As one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading non-bank lenders, Liberty Financial was on the lookout to redesign and build their new website that would stand out and provide customers with an enhanced user experience. Working in collaboration with Melbourne-based agency Honest Fox, Liberty moved away from an open source CMS to using Storyblok, resulting in a 50% cut in development time, a reduction of their mobile load times from 3.5 to 1.8 seconds, and a 90 Google Lighthouse Score

Switching from a monolithic CMS to scale for enterprise needs

As part of the new website build, Liberty opted to go with a headless CMS to decouple the dependencies found in tied monolithic CMSs. The laborious and hands-on migration process in a monolithic setup did not fit their enterprise ambitions, including heavy lifting on the developer side to maintain the system. 

Requirements for building a distinctive lender website 

Because of this, a few requirements were on Liberty’s radar for their new CMS, including: 

• The need to improve content deployment processes: Having one monolithic CMS architecturally tied together meant content creators and developers had to work in one space. In the long run, this became difficult to manage, triggering the need for a CMS that could allow each party to work independently and meet further downstream to ensure streamlined content operations.
• A SaaS solution to take care of all updates and maintenance: Liberty’s developers had to continuously ensure their previous setup was running smoothly with heavy maintenance and overhead. This resulted in lost time. Having a SaaS solution was vital in their search to take off the weight of maintenance, allowing the team to focus on important innovative work.
• A streamlined migration process: The existing CMS had a laborious and hands-on migration process that did not fit their ambitions to scale and grow. Liberty needed a headless CMS with a robust Management and Image API to manage content easily.

Storyblok’s capabilities to empower marketers and developers

Teaming up with Honest Fox for their new website build meant that the website had to look good and also work for Liberty’s teams beyond the launch. Storyblok came as a great choice being a headless CMS. Using Storyblok, Liberty reduced its development time by 50%.

With the requirements in mind, today, Liberty is able to: 

• Empower their marketers to make easy updates using the intuitive Visual Editor to see what customers will see in different formats (web and mobile sites)
• Allow developers to work on their own spaces and meet further along the line using the User Management feature within Storyblok
• Easily rollback in just 2 minutes if there is a mistake, using a static site generator (resulting in fewer API calls to the CMS and data consumption) 
• Use Storyblok’s Management API for static site generation
• Ship native plugin support with Vue and Nuxt.js
• Host a visual-heavy site, using Storyblok’s Image API to work on images within the CMS, allowing the team to easily compress, rename, store, and optimize all in one place

Creating a fast and functional site with Storyblok

With the help of Storyblok, Liberty transformed the functionality of its flagship website. Liberty intends to roll-out Storyblok to other group websites across Australia and New Zealand. As a target, Liberty set its sights on averaging its website load time to 2 seconds or less and reducing the previous mobile load times from 3.5 seconds. 

Using a combination of Storyblok, Vue, and Nuxt allowed a robust static site generation, with 48% reduction in mobile load times. This has also contributed to improving their SEO on key pages. On top of this, Google Lighthouse scores increased from 55 to 90 on specific pages with the help of Storyblok’s Image API. 

Running a website as static for usability

Being a leading non-bank lender in Australia and New Zealand with an extensive customer base, expects heavy traffic to the site. One of the main features they were looking for was static site generation. By running a site as static, Liberty can handle larger traffic volumes more easily without being slowed down.

Both Liberty’s developers, and Honest Fox preferred to build the frontend website using Vue and NuxtJS, with Nuxt as their static site generator. This meant that their site could be hosted serverless and wouldn’t require constant maintenance. The final hosting has been configured on Azure Blob Storage (AWS S3 of Azure). 

This also included implementing a design system framework using Storybook. The design system contained a style guide, component library, and pattern library, with individual UI design components in Vue, tied to Nuxt and powered by Storyblok. 

The Power of Connection: Storyblok’s Management API

Stoyblok’s Management API is used as the preferred option for image compression and hosting. And with their information stored in another internal system, the Management API aids the statically-generated site in retrieving all relevant information to Storyblok. The Management API also lends to Liberty’s homepage, bringing data from Trustpilot that shows customer reviews and retrieves data on each Liberty Adviser in a postcode search bar.

A CMS made simple: Onboarding for newcomers

Today at Liberty, developers, content creators, copywriters, and the group’s marketing advisory team work together in Storyblok. A simple how-to guide for any new person using Storyblok was vital for such dynamic roles. At the same time, Honest Fox’s implementation in parallel with the Liberty developer team ensured that Liberty could take on the work and progress beyond the website launch.

With the previous open-source CMS, any new joiner needed a few days to understand the system, compared to just a few hours with Storyblok. With specific component blocks on multiple website sections, Liberty’s team has used Interlinked Stories to update automatically. This means that any development change to a component is updated automatically on every page that uses that component.