About the client

PODS is a moving and storage company with more than 25 years of experience. The company pioneered portable moving and storage in 1998 and has completed more than seven million moves. PODS provides residential and commercial moving, relocation, and storage services across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Challenge

PODS wanted to move away from a monolithic digital experience platform that had become difficult to manage and costly to maintain. The existing platform limited agility, slowed deployments, and created operational overhead for both development and content teams.

The infrastructure had grown increasingly complex over time. Legacy services and unused roles continued to consume resources and increase maintenance costs. Environment setup required significant manual coordination, and deployments took nearly an hour to complete, slowing delivery cycles and limiting responsiveness to business needs.

The content team also faced ongoing challenges with authoring and publishing. Shared content updates had to be repeated manually across more than 100 pages, increasing the risk of inconsistencies and human error. Slow CMS performance, duplicative content structures, and publishing issues made it difficult to deliver timely updates and maintain content quality.

At the same time, site performance suffered under the monolithic architecture. Slow page load times, inconsistent caching, and infrastructure dependencies impacted the user experience and limited the site’s ability to scale efficiently during high-traffic periods.

Solution

XCentium implemented a composable architecture centered on Contentstack, a headless CMS, and Next.js. Moving to a SaaS-based platform eliminated the need for PODS to manage infrastructure, servers, and platform maintenance while providing built-in scalability, security, and availability.

To improve content operations, XCentium redesigned the content model using structured, reusable components. Shared content and global fields could now be centrally managed and dynamically referenced across the site. This reduced duplication, simplified updates, and improved consistency across digital experiences.

The migration strategy focused on modernizing the platform rather than simply replicating legacy structures. Using the DAKI process — Drop, Add, Keep, Improve — the team removed outdated content and configurations, improved existing structures, and introduced capabilities better aligned with the new platform architecture.

XCentium also developed AI-assisted migration scripts to support the transition from the legacy CMS to Contentstack. These scripts used intelligent field mapping and automated transformation logic to migrate content into structured models while preserving editorial integrity and reducing manual effort.

To improve site performance and scalability, the new platform adopted a Jamstack architecture built with Next.js. Pages were pre-rendered and delivered through a global CDN, reducing reliance on server-side rendering and improving load times across devices and regions. The decoupled architecture also improved scalability and reduced deployment complexity. 
 

Outcomes

The move to a composable SaaS architecture reduced operational complexity and gave PODS a more scalable and flexible digital foundation. Development teams spent less time managing infrastructure and deployments, while content authors gained a faster and more efficient publishing experience.

Structured content and reusable components improved consistency across the site and simplified ongoing content management. At the same time, the Jamstack architecture improved site speed, reliability, and deployment efficiency.

The modernization effort also strengthened SEO performance, accelerated time-to-market, and positioned PODS to scale its digital ecosystem more effectively.