About PODS

Since 1998, PODS has been a leading moving and storage company whose mission is to provide its customers with support and flexibility for “all of life’s moves”. PODS is a global brand operating in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. 

PODS partnered with XCentium on their digital transformation journey, modernizing their pods.com and pods.ca websites on a composable stack with Contentstack and Next.js.

The Challenge

PODS was looking to move from a monolithic DXP to a composable digital stack to improve website visitors experience, improve SEO, streamline internal marketing operations, reorganize website content, and operate on a more nimble SaaS platform.

Infrastructure Complexities

The existing platform had grown increasingly difficult to manage over time due to its complex infrastructure and fragmented setup. Multiple roles and services which were no longer actively used but continued to add to operational overhead and infrastructure costs.
 

Key challenges included:

• Unused roles leading to higher costs: Legacy configurations and outdated roles remained active, consuming unnecessary resources and inflating hosting and maintenance expenses.
• Maintenance and environment setups: Standing up new environments or maintaining existing ones required manual effort and coordination between teams, resulting in slow delivery and configuration inconsistencies.
• Lengthy deployment cycles: Each deployment took nearly an hour to complete, creating bottlenecks for development teams and delaying the release of updates or new features.
• These challenges not only increased the total cost of ownership but also reduced agility, making it difficult for teams to respond quickly to business needs or market opportunities.

Content Authoring Challenges

The content entry team faced significant challenges updating and managing content within the legacy CMS. Over time, technical debt and inefficiencies in the platform created bottlenecks that slowed down publishing and made routine updates unnecessarily complex. The result was reduced productivity, inconsistent content, and longer turnaround times for marketing and promotional efforts.
 

Key challenges included:

• Slow and unresponsive CMS interface: The authoring experience was hindered by performance issues, causing long load times and frequent timeouts that disrupted daily workflows.
• Repetitive updates across 100+ pages: Promotion copy and shared content had to be manually updated across numerous pages, increasing effort, risk of human error, and time to publish.
• Duplicative folders and content: The lack of structured content organization led to redundancy and confusion, making it difficult for authors to locate and manage assets efficiently.
• Frequent publishing issues: Publishing was often delayed or failed due to deployment dependencies and human error from duplicative content, directly impacting content velocity and site reliability.

These challenges limited the content team’s agility and made it difficult to deliver timely, consistent digital experiences across multiple channels.

Site Performance

The legacy platform struggled to deliver consistent performance at scale, especially during periods of high traffic or campaign activity. As the site grew in size and complexity, response times slowed, directly impacting user experience.
 

Key challenges included:

• Slow page load times: The monolithic architecture and unoptimized assets led to high latency, resulting in slower user experiences across both desktop and mobile devices.
• Heavy infrastructure dependencies: Multiple interconnected services introduced performance bottlenecks and made scaling costly and time-consuming.
• Inconsistent caching and CDN strategy: The lack of a unified caching approach caused variations in load times and frequent cache invalidation issues.

The Solution

Composable Solution: At the core of the solution is a transition to a modern, SaaS-based composable architecture leveraging Contentstack. This shift eliminated the need to manage underlying infrastructure, servers, and platform maintenance. The SaaS model ensures automatic scalability, built-in security, and high availability, removing the complexity of infrastructure provisioning and performance tuning.

Content Modeling Approach: A key part of improving the content authoring experience was a redesign through a structured content model. With a structured content model, content was broken down into global, reusable fields, and components. These components are centrally managed and referenced dynamically across multiple pages. A single update to a shared entry now automatically reflects everywhere it’s used, eliminating redundancy and ensuring consistency across the site.

Content Migration Strategy: Unlike most migration approaches that start at the source and move all content “as-is,” our migration strategy begins at the target system. This ensures that technical debt and inefficiencies are not carried over, enabling a cleaner, more streamlined solution.

We call this approach the DAKI (Drop, Add, Keep, Improve) process. With DAKI, we drop unnecessary items, add missing or needed capabilities, and either keep or improve existing content and functionality. This method reduces legacy clutter, optimizes operational efficiency, and positions the organization to fully leverage the benefits of the new platform.

AI Powered Migration: To handle the complexity of legacy structures, we developed base migration scripts enhanced with AI-based field mapping. This allowed us to intelligently transform legacy content into well-structured, future-proof data models in Contentstack, saving significant time and reducing manual errors.

Our process included:

• Mapping old fields to new structured content in Contentstack using machine learning patterns and base logic
• Automating content transformation and import, while keeping editorial integrity intact

Jamstack approach: To address performance challenges, the new solution adopted a Jamstack architecture built with Next.js and integrated seamlessly with Contentstack. This modern approach decouples the front end from the back end, allowing pages to be pre-rendered and served directly from a global CDN rather than relying on server-side processing for every request.

This architectural shift dramatically improved page load times and site reliability. Pre-generation and edge caching ensure that users experience fast, consistent performance worldwide, even during high-traffic campaigns. The decoupled nature of Jamstack also enhances scalability, enabling the site to handle sudden spikes in traffic without additional infrastructure management or cost increases.

Outcome

Moving to a SaaS-based composable architecture empowered PODS to focus on delivering exceptional digital experiences rather than managing infrastructure complexities. The transition eliminated the burden of maintaining servers, environments, and deployment pipelines, allowing teams to concentrate on innovation, content quality, and user engagement.

By adopting Contentstack, PODS gained a scalable and flexible content platform that dramatically improved both operational efficiency and authoring agility. The introduction of structured content and reusable components reduced duplication and simplified content management, giving authors more control while ensuring consistency across channels. 

Meanwhile, the Jamstack architecture delivered exceptional site performance and reliability, with pages loading faster and deployments completing in a fraction of the time.

These combined improvements not only streamlined internal operations but also enhanced SEO, improved time-to-market, and created a more responsive digital foundation capable of scaling with business growth.