CarFinance 247 Case Study
dotCMS Helps CarFinance 247 Speed Into the Modern Era
CarFinance 247 is one of the largest car finance brokers in the UK. With dotCMS’ help, they updated their outdated website and made it easier for marketers to update content without getting developer assistance.
Industry
Financial Services
Country
UK
Intro
CarFinance 247 is the UK’s leading digital car finance platform connecting car buyers, sellers, and lenders. By turning the traditional car finance process on its head, CarFinance 247 enables consumers to secure their finance first, empowering and supporting them throughout the car buying journey.
Challenge
Even though CarFinance 247 provided an innovative solution for car financing, they were using outdated methodologies — a website developed in-house on a legacy Microsoft stack. The main issue they suffered from was that software developers needed to be the ones to make content changes to the site, even for simple text changes.
For a website that required frequent updates every month, the technology was 10 years outdated and required a small team of developers to manage, wasting precious technology resources. Frequent changes needed to be made in 20 different places, and they also had to deal with the additional headache of maintaining private cloud infrastructure.
Before dotCMS, we were wasting a small team of developers on website maintenance. With dotCMS Cloud, we have completely freed up our development team and no longer have to worry about bandwidth, security, upgrades and patches-- dotCMS takes care of all that.
Solution
CarFinance 247 CTO Daniel Graham had previously worked with dotCMS a decade earlier at another company where it is still in use today. When the company needed a new CMS, he immediately thought of dotCMS as an ideal solution for their content needs. It also helped that dotCMS was open-source, which would make it easy for the current team of software developers to evaluate.
CarFinance 247 wanted to build its website on a headless platform to give itself added flexibility. They also needed workflows, versioning, and asset management, which dotCMS had in abundance.
The fact that dotCMS was API-based would also enable them to integrate data services, and the multisite features would be useful for managing several subsites. Plus, dotCMS’ NoCode content authoring capabilities would allow marketers to publish new articles, pages, and landing pages frequently, quickly and independently from developers.
Results
Since implementing dotCMS, the developer-dependency for the website has been reduced significantly. Now, marketers can edit the content on their own, and only a few developers are needed for occasional maintenance.
dotCMS powers the entire front-end experience for CarFinance 247 as well as their landing pages. The website is also integrated with the Carcraft website through their vehicle search API.
The website is also hosted on dotCMS cloud, which spreads the load and ensures the website is up even if their private cloud is down. By not having to maintain a website infrastructure, they no longer have to worry about bandwidth, security, upgrades, and patches since dotCMS takes care of everything.
CarFinance 247 is now on a Long Term Supported (LTS) version; enabling seamless upgrades ensuring excellent support and account management.