Complete content migration and performance boost for a huge content library

The new Australian Leisure Management (ALM) website has been launched, and is built on our favourite platforms: Statamic and Laravel. Not only is this a brand new design, but also a migration of all of their historical content with full editability within Statamic, and creating new opportunities for users to interact with their profile, create content and upload new materials. This feature-packed new site also improves performance phenomenally

Over 55,000 pages… that’s over two decade’s worth… all fully editable

Moving platforms is not a simple decision, especially with over two decade’s worth of content. And of course, no one wants to sit there and manually migrate those page-by-page.

Statamic is our content management system of choice, built on Laravel (and giving us all of Laravel’s incredible features), and gave us the scalable platform to deliver a large-scale and still performant site.

We created custom migration scripts to bring across all content, in a variety of different forms from articles to pages to business profiles and even users, to ensure every word, every byte and every image remains truly editable within the new platform.

But we did go one step further too: we automated the processing of the legacy content in to a format that Statamic’s Bard text field and its block-based Sets understands so that every single word feels truly native and organic within the Statamic platform.

Want to change an image? Sure – because the image is a real asset within Statamic’s ecosystem. Need to rename a page, and change all of the links to it? Already done: because all of the links are Statamic references, your links are already updated.

Getting help from users with user-generated content

To improve the user experience, users can sign up to the ALM site, and take ownership of their business profile (or create a new one). And also made it really easy for profile managers to invite their colleagues to join them with keeping content up to date, and being able to submit content too.

Yes, that means users can submit content to the ALM website – and we created an effortless approval workflow for content administrators to go through to help review and approve (or reject) any of this content.

The editing experience is seamless on the front end of the website, and allows users to upload a hero image for their content.

The TipTap editor we created outputs content in the exact same format as Statamic, allowing us to create this new content directly within Statamic, making it visible to administrators immediately.

We did go one step further too and created a number of sets for users to use to add rich media like images and video directly in their content, and ensure their output is fully compatible, compliant and expected with the Statamic Bard editing experience.

This even extended to managing job listings too!

And to help keep things tidy, we’ve created an organised asset file structure for uploaded images to keep things neat, and for any rejected or expired content, a time-delayed automated cleanup process to remove it from the platform after a few days – just in case any changes are needed.

By allowing users to author content, and have it ready to review for the admin team and publish at the click of a button has helped to streamline the platform’s ability to collect meaningful, quality and user-created content.

Improving performance while continuing to grow

As the site continues to grow, with more and more content, performance becomes even more important. On the previous site, page load times were unpredictable and sluggish, at times exceeding 17 seconds per page.

We’ve leveraged a combination of Statamic’s caching measures and Laravel’s underlying technology to serve pages in milliseconds, about 340x as fast, and employed intelligent approaches to refreshing caches to keep pages up to date.

No, that’s not a typo. We’ve taken page load times from over 17 seconds down to 50 milliseconds.

From finely-tuned Australian hosting, to utilising Cloudflare’s global CDN and image storage, we’ve worked hard to select the right underlying technologies to build and host this new mammoth site, but not compromise on editability, stability and reliability.

Do you need to work with experts in content migration from your old CMS to a lightning-fast website built with Statamic? Say hello – we’d love to chat!