Case goals and results

Our scope was to remake a site in a more comprehensive and future-proof way learning from the mistakes made in the past. This way no major visual upgrades were made for the end-users, but the backend has its own improvements. During the migration from WP to D8 we made many structural changes including changes to the main navigation, reorganized the content and threw out the unnecessary features in order to achieve the best possible performance.
Since the platform is 3rd-party-heavy, we just as much needed to rely on the community as much to create custom modules. We provided a new Contextly integration, made several patches for Yoast, ported and improved the Contextly module written originally for Drupal 7 and customized the Thunder admin theme. During the project, we learned the iframely, Algolia, AMP, Disqus and Parse.ly from inside out to achieve the desired goals.

As a result, we created a platform much faster than WordPress was with a clean backend and an editorial UI already way better than stock Drupal including workflow management for external editors.

“Some @diginomica site stats for the nerds - now running 78% faster (close to Google speed), traffic up 15-16% consistently, bounce rate down 3.5%, thanks to @BrainsumCOM” - https://twitter.com/dahowlett/status/1126553143557394433

SEO boosted by the performance, thanks to the CDN and a full AMP implementation organic search traffic is now up by 26%!