Igniting Change: How EnergySage supercharged their digital experiences

• Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
• Technology Stack: Nuxt, Amazon S3, and Amazon CloudFront

As the United States’ largest home electrification marketplace, EnergySage (opens in a new window) is a one-stop shop for homeowners looking to go electric or solar with clean energy technologies and for industry service providers looking to connect with highly engaged customers. Faced with having to maintain two legacy systems and custom-coded pages that struggled to keep up with the moving landscape, adapt to changing consumer mobile consumption, and heavy marketer-to-developer reliance for new content updates, EnergySage has made a complete rehaul for faster time-to-market that electrifies and engages their customers.

Watt’s new: energizing user experiences

• Turbocharged time-to-market: EnergySage powers its public marketing pages with Storyblok. New landing pages built using previously built, reusable blocks and templates through Atomic Design take just 2 hours to market. Building a completely redesigned page with net new blocks takes an average of 1.5 months.
• A centralized content hub that makes things easy-peasy: The development team brought together all site content from their WordPress, Django CMS, and custom-coded pages up to modern SEO best practices with Storyblok. This meant all content became centralized, easily accessible, and manageable with a streamlined content authoring experience for marketers.
• Innovative approaches to content development: Developed a command for specifying around 100 small tweaks (such as headline copy and images) to a single and optimized base landing page template. This then generates around 100 different landing pages.

Charging ahead with features that energize

• Flexibility to design a simpler, lower-maintenance site architecture
• Multiple and separate deployable codebases that break free from their previous large and delicate monolith codebase
• Build and leverage reusable templates and components that can be shared across a new and innovative technology stack
• Integrate the built-in image hosting with EnergySage’s content authoring experience (where the JSON is returned from the Storyblok API, Amazon Cloudfront CDN caching for fast performance, and the automatic resizing loads just the bytes that are needed)
• Transparent and predictable pricing alongside a safe and secure CMS experience with ISO270001 certification
• Integrate with a best-of-breed selection in storage and performance with Amazon S3
• A real-time preview Visual Editor and better rich text editor that works with marketers instead of against
• Intuitive and user-friendly admin interface that allows for easy navigation amongst projects and pages
• An official Nuxt and Vue framework build that gives the upper hand for EnergySage’s developers to construct in a framework that they are familiar with and integrate with their Nuxt apps via the Storyblok Content API
• Run scripts for batch operations on Storyblok content using the Management API

EnergySage is the United States' largest home electrification marketplace, enabling homeowners to sign up and receive free quotes for home solar, battery storage, heat pumps, and more. EnergySage connects homeowners with experienced high-quality installers, saving homeowners 20 - 30% (thousands of dollars) on installation costs.

Hurdles in the quest for digital experiences

EnergySage was previously using WordPress, Django CMS, and custom-coded pages.

• From a marketing perspective: Their old setup struggled to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of Google’s Core Web Vitals, adapt to the increasing consumption of mobile web content amongst their customers, and go to market quickly with new content due to heavy marketer-to-developer reliance on simple updates and publishing.
• From a technical standpoint: Maintaining three platforms with similar content meant having to take all the heavy lifting in time and maintenance to upkeep the systems, as well as the main concern of security. It increasingly became difficult to reuse layouts, templates and components between them. As some pages were previously also custom-built, any changes to those pages would need dedicated investment, taking away precious time from the engineering teams that could have been spent working on new features.

Their primary motivation was to unify all site content from the various CMSs onto a centralized platform and support technical SEO and performance requirements.

Powering up for marketers and developers alike

With the move to Storyblok, EnergySage underwent a complete redesign and migration of all its content, which lasted 10 months. This helped them ensure all the foundational pieces were in place to energize its content and technical experiences for its team and customers.

There’s something for everyone: Several teams use Storyblok today at EnergySage. These include:

• A content team that regularly writes and updates articles and landing pages on a daily basis
• A product team that maintains their programmatically generated pages, containing up-to-date, localized pricing and market guidance based on proprietary information from their marketplace
• Their partnerships team supports and builds customized landing pages for their partner organizations
• EnergySage’s acquisition marketing team builds customized landing pages for paid campaigns

With a vision of a planet powered by clean, affordable, and reliable energy for all, EnergySage is now harnessing the power of fresh content experiences and offerings to its customers nationwide.