Boosting Amtico’s digital performance in 6 languages

Headquarters: Coventry, United Kingdom
Technology stack: Netlify, Astro, Algolia

Amtico is a British pioneer of luxury vinyl tiles with a history of over 5 decades of providing beautiful floors worldwide. By designing, innovating, and manufacturing industry-leading flooring, they have paved the way to better spaces for their retail and commercial customers in over 130 countries.

The company's previous website was based on Umbraco 7, which had been extensively customized to the team's needs. Over time, however, the system needed to catch up with the growing visitor numbers and modern performance expectations. Additionally, the company needed a new content management system (CMS) which, once implemented, could allow them to manage the entire website themselves. To achieve their goals, Amtico partnered with Anything - Storyblok's solution partner based out of the United Kingdom. Leveraging the power of the CMS, the agency developed Amtico's new, scalable, and technology-proof website in 6 languages. Additionally, the platform achieved a 100% score in SEO Google performance and 94% in page accessibility.

Section titled Blockers on streamlining Amtico’s digital growth

The company used Cloudflare to boost the website's performance as a temporary fix, but ultimately, it wasn't a solution to the long-term performance issues. Besides the main pain point, which was the website's progressive slowness, Amtico faced other technology limitations:

• Time-consuming content management: The number of Umbraco custom components had swelled to over 100. Knowing which to use was confusing, and Amtico had a steep learning curve when onboarding new team members.
• Ununified design system: Amtico needed a solution that would enable them to stick to a coherent approach when building and styling content. It was important to create consistent landing pages for both the company’s Commercial (B2B) and Residential (B2C) target audiences.
• Scalability issues: The company was looking for a solution to help them create a long-term roadmap for the website. With their new CMS, they wanted to regularly add new features to adapt to planned product launches.
• The necessity to enhance search: Amtico aimed to add a site and product search feature that would be ultra-fast and intelligent, helping users find what they need.
• Localization: Another project’s requirement was finding a seamless method for handling content translations, with an emphasis on integration with search engine management tools.
• The need for a simple and flexible CMS: The company wanted a user-friendly solution that simplifies content creation and updates, enabling marketers to modify content independently of developers.
• Security updates: Amtico required robust security for the system and customer data, proving increasingly difficult as their current platform version began to be phased out.

Section titled The journey in navigating the perfect CMS

In search of a solution to their challenges, Amtico pitched against several agencies. Some of them proposed traditional CMSs, such as Umbraco 10. After deciding to collaborate with Anything, they built three separate prototypes on Prismic, Contentful, and Storyblok. The latter turned out to be the best fit for their specific requirements:

• Anything utilized Storyblok's Field-level and Folder-level translation features. After moving translated content into the created design tabs, releasing the updated language variants was straightforward. This allowed Amtico to have different pages for each locale in 6 languages.
• Amtico's team was amazed with Storyblok's Visual Editor. It let them flexibly edit content with live preview and gave control over the needed changes. The tool made website management joyful and streamlined the marketers' content update process.
• The CMS's technology-agnostic nature allowed the platform to be connected to various tech solutions. Leveraging Storyblok's tech partnerships, Anything integrated Netlify for hosting and Astro as a framework. They also took advantage of the CMS's API-first approach. It enabled the website's scalability and data migration from Umbraco.
• To provide Amtico's clients with a functional search feature, the agency connected Algolia. The solution allowed the team to create streamlined and customized search experiences. In terms of user experience, it delivers search queries in milliseconds, offers tolerance for typos, and provides Amtico with helpful analytics.
• The company leveraged Storyblok's reusable and nestable blocks to create preset versions of content templates. This helped them use fewer blocks and made it simpler to manage different content setups.

Section titled All hands on deck

Anything gave just one training session to the Amtico team. Some of the team members had never used a CMS before. Yet, they immediately felt comfortable using Storyblok to prepare content for new collection launches. Additionally, they were delighted with how easy and intuitive Storyblok was to use. When the project was nearing completion, Anything produced a complete Storyblok User Guide for the company.

Section titled Synergy in digital innovation

Throughout the project implementation, Anything worked closely with Amtico to define the solution for their clients' new digital journey. Amtico knew precisely what they needed from their website, but they could only achieve it once they opted for Storyblok. The two companies worked in partnership as an expert team to deliver the solution against some challenging timelines. Together, they created an engaging and easy-to-navigate user experience that reflects Amtico's brand: effortlessly stylish, dependable, reliable, and reassuringly usable. They're still exploring Storyblok to extend the website's functionality, such as powering retail experiences.