Merge and rebrand of Optimizely’s website

A new website was developed for Episerver during the rebranding and merging with Optimizely. State-of-the-art development was made to complete the project within only three months. Find out more about the background, process and result in this DXP project.

Background

Episerver had recently acquired Optimizely and had taken the decision to merge the brands and rebrand Episerver to Optimizely. A big chunk of this brand merger was to merge and rebrand the Episerver and Optimizely websites. Given that the Episerver website was much more comprehensive and already using their own leading DXP platform, we decided to use this as a base for the merger and to rebrand this site to Optimizely.

A team from Epinova had been leading the development of the Episerver site together with an in-house team from Episerver for a few years. Since Episerver had acquired quite a few brands recently, the teams were well experienced with merging in content and adapting the platform to new brands and products.

The episerver.com solution included marketing products, a full e-commerce solution for purchasing courses and certifications and a well-integrated self-service portal for partners to view and update their details.

Challenges

As with any merger or rebranding, being able to move fast was important in order to get the most important digital asset live with the new combined brand. Given the urge, the team was joined by additional external developers to speed up the development.

Since Episerver/Optimizely had a globally reaching website, it was very important that the performance for clients was good, regardless of where in the world they would connect. Latency can be a big issue for a dynamic site with a lot of assets and JavaScript.

The site already made extensive use of Cloudflare CDN. This is included in DXP with not only cached assets, but also entirely cached pages for quick loading of the site around the world. In order to still be able to get personalized experiences this required client-side personalization techniques using JavaScript. Examples of such are content recommendations as well as dynamically client-side generated elements like the top menu.

We have worked in short iterations together with those responsible for various business areas. Here we have benefited greatly from Epinova's various modules and our deep technical expertise.

Linus Ekström, CEO Epinova and OMVP (Optimizely Most Valuable Professional)

Process

The main development work started around early May after a few months of preparation. The target was set to release an overhauled version of the site including content and some new functionality from the Optimizely. Optimizely wanted to further enhance the look and feel of the site. Therefore a lot of new components for the site were built using React for more interaction.

To minimize the amount of manual work that had to be done, a new Optimizely DXP instance was set up. Content from the Optimizely site was mainly migrated automatically using APIs from the current Optimizely site. Being able to quickly get a new version of the site up and running was key in order for editors to start working on the merged content structure. This also allowed for testing portions of the site continuously as development proceeded elsewhere.

Adam Blomberg, Director, Customer Experience Excellence

- Epinova's commitment has been fantastic, and their technical know-how and expertise on Optimizely as a platform has been invaluable to us in this project aimed at highlighting the strength of our platform and our products.

Results

We were able to launch the updated and rebranded website on time after three intense months. Directly after the initial release we continued the work with an upgrade to Optimizely Content Cloud 12 to further increase performance. This also included even more improvements to performance with server-side rendering of JavaScript and Vite as a client package manager to reduce the need of the amount of assets being downloaded.