Lano’s 5-day migration of 1000+ pages to Storyblok

Lano’s old setup was on various WordPress instances per locale. After repetitive upkeep and updates to the system and their content alongside faulty plug-ins, Lano explored the option of switching to a headless CMS. Storyblok became Lano’s CMS of choice based on the flexibility of migrating all content seamlessly, its Visual Editor and content library, and its ease of use for both marketers and developers. 

Founded in 2018, with the first version of the product in 2019, Lano is a global payroll consolidation platform that aids companies worldwide in hiring, managing, and paying full-time employees and contractors globally in over 170 countries. The platform handles global employment (Employer of Record network), payroll consolidation & global payroll with embedded fintech and contractor management, creating global workforce data in one single source of truth. 

Moving from WordPress to Storyblok 

Storyblok is used primarily to power Lano’s main website, product pages including blog and podcast pages, and country guides. With their original setup, different teams had to face serious difficulties on a day-to-day basis::

• The lack of a visual editing tool and WYSIWYG experience
• Absence of user role permissions for each editor
• Inadequate localization features
• Heavy technical upkeep - WordPress made it slow to build new pages, where developers had to code the same things repeatedly as every page was designed and coded from scratch without no real shared elements and components 
• Inconsistencies in design and code and having to maintain a separate team specializing in WordPress

Storyblok came onto Lano’s radar after their Director of Product had used Storyblok in their previous work experience as a quick and easy-to-use system for both marketers and developers.

Storyblok is a perfect fit as a lightweight best-of-breed solution that allows detailed customization and empowers editors to easily create new pages based on modular components.

Choosing Storyblok: Optimizing content efforts

Ultimately, Storyblok’s key features won Lano to make the switch in improving and optimizing their content experience were: 

• The Visual Editor immediately provides editors with a real-time content editing experience that allows pages to be built quickly and easily
• The ease of use for both developers and non-technical users (even without a lot of CMS experience) to freely adapt and edit content without the fear of making mistakes 
• Localization features and Storyblok’s field-type translations help the content team manage pages in four languages 
• The User & Roles feature allows external users, such as freelancers working with Lano, to access the content and code at different capacities based on their access level
• The ability for developers to use the technical language they were familiar with through React

Headless architecture: 5 reasons to implement it >

Migrating 1000+ pages in just five days to Storyblok

Led by the marketing, product design, and engineering teams, the overall implementation and development took four months to complete from their WordPress setup to Storyblok. Lano started with rebuilding their homepage and core pages before moving step by step through their entire blog, podcast pages, resources, country/payroll/freelancer guides, and the rest.

The entire migration was completed in a smooth and automated manner, with 1000+ pages and country guides migrated to Storyblok in just five days. Doing so, together with establishing a globally-accessible component library at the beginning, allowed content managers and editors to quickly build and reuse/repurpose pages through reusable components and pages that could be adapted.

Bringing on the rest of the team once Storyblok was ready to use took only one hour of onboarding, before they were set to go into content production collaboratively. 

Translations for Lano have also become faster and easy to manage compared to their previous setup. Using Storyblok’s field-type translations for four different languages (English, French, German, and Spanish), content managers can quickly go in and translate what is necessary efficiently.

In the future, Lano plans to further improve their workflows and website performance by moving to Storyblok's GraphQL API, as well as exploring additional options to see Storyblok's capabilities in their web app.