Algolia

Algolia is a SaaS-based search engine provider, offering powerful search solutions to thousands of businesses all over the world. A funding round in July 2021 gave the company unicorn status, with a valuation of $2.25 billion. Using Algolia’s technology, businesses can give customers better search results, without needing to invest in the expensive infrastructure required to support such search capabilities.

As a SaaS company, Algolia understands the importance of content for informing potential customers about their offering. Their website is an important public face of the brand, as well as a major point of sales. That’s why, for Algolia, it’s critical to optimize their content operations as much as possible.

By switching to Kontent.ai as their modular content platform, Algolia has simplified workflows for developers and marketers, increased the speed at which content can be published, and laid the foundations for new content projects. Let’s see how they made it happen.

Overcoming a tight coupling of developers and content

Algolia’s website is powered by Next.js, a JavaScript framework that helps businesses create performant websites. Originally, Algolia did not use a CMS to manage most of the content on their site. Content was updated directly by developers, who would receive requests from marketers and other teams when a change was needed. Most content lived directly in the site codebase.

For smaller sites and teams, this setup can work just fine. But as Algolia grew, it became difficult to manage all the requests from marketers in a timely fashion. Marketers didn’t have the freedom to change their content themselves, and developers had to spend their own time working on updates for the marketing team.

Fortunately, this was an issue with a clear solution. A headless CMS gives marketers a user-friendly interface to create, edit, and publish their content, and plays nicely with Next.js sites. That’s because headless CMSs are channel agnostic: they serve content as a JSON object to channels that request it and are not coupled to any specific presentation layer.

The new challenge was to choose the right CMS for their needs.

Kontent.ai stands out from the competition

Algolia set out to evaluate different headless CMS vendors to find the right one for their needs. In the end, they selected five different vendors to investigate more thoroughly, creating proofs of concept in each.

While all headless CMSs offer similar core functionality (serving content in a channel agnostic way), they all have different ways of doing so. Each headless CMS has its own unique interface for creating content, its own way of allowing users to create content models, unique integrations, and its own SDKs, APIs, and documentation.

These points of differentiation are where Kontent.ai stands out. Algolia prefers Kontent.ai’s user-friendly authoring experience that makes switching to headless CMS less intimidating. Their developers appreciated clear documentation and a platform that works well with Next.js sites. And Kontent.ai made it easy to create content models built from components that mirrored their React components, making it easy to create new site templates from scratch, using their existing components. This experience drove Algolia to choose Kontent.ai as the headless CMS for their site.

Increased productivity and independence, with big plans for the future

After implementing Kontent.ai, and working in the platform for a year, marketers and developers at Algolia are happy with the results. Angelique Fey, Senior Program Marketing Manager at Algolia said, “Working with Kontent.ai has been super easy,” and shared how the platform has significantly reduced the backlog of tasks for both marketers and developers. 

Since Kontent.ai now allows marketers to update content on their own, it’s easier for Algolia marketers to try new ideas quickly. They’ve made more use of things like A/B tests of content in different places on the web, which helps them ensure they’re using the best performing copy.

Developers also spend much less time updating content for marketers. Ronan Levesque, Engineering Manager for the Visibility Team at Algolia, estimated just how much time working with Kontent.ai saves: “we spent maybe 20% to 30% of our time on updating content for the site. Now that’s time we have for other tasks.” The team was able to migrate to Kontent.ai in just three months and have not needed to update hardcoded content since.

Algolia has exciting future plans for Kontent.ai, too. They’re currently working on localizing their site content for different languages, a task that Kontent.ai has significantly simplified with the help of built-in localization capabilities. Algolia has also built a custom translation tool that they have connected to Kontent.ai, which is possible due to Kontent.ai’s easy integrability with other services. For organizations serving customers in multiple locales, regions, or languages, Kontent.ai helps ensure audiences are getting content tailored to them. 

In time, Algolia also plans to migrate their documentation to Kontent.ai. This is another step in creating a single unified content hub for Algolia’s content, giving them full ownership of and visibility into all the content they create. 

For more on Algolia and Kontent.ai, read a short blog written by an Algolia and Kontent.ai user showcasing a project built using both platforms. If you would like to see how Kontent.ai can help your business, schedule a demo of the platform today.