Modernizing Marketing Technology for Higher Education
Encoura's mission is helping higher education institutions make better decisions. But their legacy marketing website was holding back their own team — outdated CMS, slow content workflows, and performance issues that undermined their digital presence. They needed a technology upgrade that would unlock marketing agility without sacrificing performance.
Pain Points
Encoura's legacy CMS made content creation painfully slow. Simple page updates required developer involvement, creating bottlenecks that delayed campaigns and frustrated marketing teams. The site struggled with modern media formats, impacting visual quality and load times. To stay competitive in the education technology market, they needed a complete modernization of their marketing website infrastructure.
Challenge
The migration had to accomplish multiple objectives simultaneously: give marketing teams autonomy to create and schedule content without technical support, improve site performance and visual quality, and introduce advanced search functionality to boost user engagement. All while maintaining SEO rankings and delivering on time and on budget.
Solution
We executed a complete migration from Encoura's legacy CMS to a modern headless architecture built on Next.js and Builder.io:
- Headless CMS: Implemented Builder.io as the visual content management layer, enabling marketing teams to create, edit, and schedule pages without developer intervention.
- Performance: Migrated to Next.js with server-side rendering and automatic image optimization for modern formats (WebP, AVIF), dramatically improving load times and visual quality.
- Search: Built advanced search functionality that improved content discoverability and user engagement across the site.
- Workflow: Established content scheduling capabilities so marketing can plan campaigns in advance and publish automatically.
Engagement model: Dedicated project team, 1-year ongoing partnership, following agile methodology with regular stakeholder alignment.
Outcome
Page creation time dropped from several days to 1-2 hours. Marketing teams gained full autonomy over content updates and scheduling — no more waiting on developer availability. Site performance improved significantly with automated modern image format support, strengthening Encoura's digital presence. Advanced search functionality boosted user engagement, helping visitors find relevant content faster.
