Elastic moves from WordPress, speeds up development process by over 500%

Elastic’s process with WordPress CMS was clumsy, slow, and prone to crash. WordPress lacks a functional staging area and the production site ran on a completely different system, so once edits were complete, all the steps had to be repeated on the production server. Because Elastic had two domains, that meant each step was repeated four times when publishing content.

Additionally, the company wanted to eliminate their dependency on a web agency to manage its content, which often took days to weeks for simple updates. The constraints between WordPress and the agency made it nearly impossible for Elastic to meet business and content demands and implement new features and integrations.

Silvie Shimizu, webmaster at Elastic, has worked with many CMSes in her career, and has extensive knowledge in Contentstack’s headless CMS’s capabilities. When tasked with Elastic’s web and CMS overhaul, she chose Contentstack to do the job.

Elastic was up and running in Contentstack within three months. In constrast, by CMS implementation standards, it would’ve easily taken them 6-9 months to deploy.

Onboarding new users took very little time thanks to the platform’s intuitive and visual interface. Content managers can jump right in with minimal prior training. As a result, Elastic no longer needs to pay an expensive agency to manage content — reducing costs by 78%.

Shimizu leveraged Contentstack’s professional services to manage the migration from WordPress. Using powerful APIs and integration capabilities, Elastic successfully and seamlessly automated creation and deployment of its documentation guide, which allowed Elastic to push documentation content to production, staging and development as needed.

Since moving to Contentstack, Elastic’s costs have been reduced across the board. Elastic has more than doubled the page views at a fraction of the cost. Under WordPress, they averaged $7,000 in monthly server costs, but Contentstack has reduced that cost by over 87% to just $890 a month.

The publishing bottleneck has disappeared, too, since Elastic no longer has to go through an agency to make changes. Simple updates that previously took weeks now take days to complete, which has allowed Elastic to complete three major redesigns in the last year and a half.