Intralox

Founded in 1971, Intralox is one of the world’s leading producers of conveyor belts and conveyance technologies, with hundreds of belt and equipment solutions and over 1,500 active patents. For many years, their main website served as primarily an informational resource. However, recent initiatives have driven the Intralox team to increase their emphasis on connecting with customers through their digital channels. To accomplish this, their website needed to be re-platformed to a modern technology stack that offers better flexibility to connect with other solutions and the ability to respond to business demands much faster than their previous solution.

Limited by a legacy content management system

The Intralox team was limited by a legacy content management system that prevented them from delivering the digital experiences they wanted. This system had been sufficient for their needs when it was implemented over a decade ago, but it lacked the flexibility required to build a modern digital experience. Making changes to the website was difficult and time-consuming as many components were interconnected. This required significant testing to ensure nothing got broken whenever changes were made. It was also difficult to integrate with external systems, as their monolithic architecture wasn’t built with extensibility in mind.

Additionally, the Intralox team wanted the freedom to redesign a new experience sometime in the future. Unfortunately, their content was full of formatting and workarounds that had been implemented through the years in order to make it display properly within their existing website. This meant there was no guarantee that this content would display properly within a different design. Before they could consider redesigning the website, they would need to migrate their content into a system that was free of formatting and could deliver it into any look and feel.

Developing a new architecture

The initial project focused on moving their existing website from their old architecture to a new, modern platform that would allow them to expand its capabilities and appearance over time. The team chose Kontent.ai to manage their content separate from any presentation or formatting. Their web pages were written in JavaScript using Gatsby.

Throughout the project, the Intralox team worked closely with Kontent.ai's Developer Relations team to ensure the integration with Gatsby would meet their multilingual needs and be able to support their large volume of content. They collaborated on improving an existing plug-in that pulls content from the CMS in order to generate static web pages. They added multilingual capabilities to this plug-in, which is now being used to create nine multilingual variants of each page. These pages are then served from their CDN to ensure fast page loads and prevent server failures from taking down the website. Recognizing that many companies could benefit from this functionality, the teams merged these improvements into the open-source project located on GitHub.

The new website is built on top of a microservices-based architecture that isolates the various parts of the website into separate components. This makes updates and development of new features much quicker as there’s less risk of a change to one area of the site breaking other parts due to interdependencies. As the team looks ahead to future projects, this component-based approach will make it much easier to refine the customer experience and integrate with additional services as the need arises.

A faster, customer-first web experience

By moving their website to this new platform, the Intralox team has benefitted from faster website page loads and the ability to respond quickly to internal business requests. They’ve also been able to implement the HTTPS protocol for their website, which is expected to offer noticeable improvements to their search engine rankings—particularly when combined with the faster page loads.

The new architecture has allowed the team to implement new changes with less testing required, as there are fewer interdependencies throughout the website. Now changes get to production faster, allowing the team to focus on more strategic initiatives. Perhaps the biggest improvement, however, is that the team now has a future-proof platform that will enable them to expand their digital offerings on their website, with the agility to make additional improvements as they come up. Stephen Bowling, Product Manager at Intralox, said it best: “We determined headless is the way of the future. It offers us a lot of advantages that are going to be important for connecting different systems down the line. It’s also given us the ability to develop and host in a modern way.”