How money.com.au propelled their site performance with Storyblok

money.com.au is an Australian company looking to disrupt the loan space. Currently, it can be hard to find the right loan in the industry without negatively impacting your credit score, passing a vast amount of time and energy searching, or paying a broker to handle it for you, resulting in a user paying more.

Australia’s landscape in loaning shows competitor rates for 1% of the population with a high credit history, high income, and no debts. Using such sites, you will usually see a great deal, go through a rate estimate on the lender’s site, and result in a massive rate shock when seeing the real rate. The experience for a user would then need to start the entire process again with another lender, only to just have the same experience. On the other hand, applying with multiple lenders consequently also marks your credit score, resulting in worse rates and an increase in your risk profile. With a finance broker as well, while they do the work for you, there is an added fee on your loan, thus paying more than expected.

Money.com.au, also known through their 'Money Matchmaker' engine, is an intelligent decision-based system, working like a broker, matches someone with up to 11 lenders to find the right loan, using actual and pre-qualified rates, no advertisements, markups, or hidden fees. In just 60 seconds or less, users can quickly receive free results on their options from all lenders that could give them a loan and apply directly from there. The organization’s main target audience are Australians aged 25 to 45 looking to obtain a loan to purchase a car, complete home renovations, consolidate debt, take a holiday or any other larger purchase. The Money Matchmaker is a pivotal offering for those looking to gain loaning advice and direction.

Money.com.au’s Origin Story

The team at money.com.au were previously set up through a custom content management system with Webflow that ran on a Cake PHP application. This meant that their designers would need to create and design pages from scratch, edit them there, and pass any new needed elements as design files to the developers. The developers would then need to build each new page or element, and inspect it before pushing it out live. As a result, there was restrained control over their SEO, with the continuous need of developers to change each title, meta description, copy text, and more.

Over time for the product and design team, this became a major pain point in their workflow. Each page or new element would need to be pulled offline, redesigned, have the developers create and test it, before pushing it out live again. This meant that all new pages or design tweaks were slow to implement due to a backlog of having to bring pages or designs offline, and complete the required tasks before pushing them live again. The team also realized from there that they needed to be able to change their page’s content quickly while ensuring that their SEO was being appropriately tracked. For the developers, any editing change would require a tedious CMS configuration with each task.

The main pain points that made the team at money.com.au consider looking and evaluating towards their next solution were:

• Slow turnaround time to any content change or new design element
• Any change to the CMS schema was both challenging and time-consuming
• Realizing the need to make reusable components available
• Provide more freedom and power to content editors to make changes to pages and designs without the need for developer assistance
• An instant and reactive system that responds to SEO changes and issues quickly

Making the move: Adopting Storyblok as a CMS solution

One of money.com.au’s key frontend developers, Rodney Cumming, had used Storyblok at his previous company, Crimson Education. With his familiarity and knowledge about Storyblok’s CMS and features, while having conducted extensive research and examination of other solutions in the market, and a 1-week multi-developer assessment, he recommended Storyblok as a solution.

The two main key decision-makers throughout the process were the key frontend developer and money.com.au's CEO. With that, some of the main reasons why they decided to choose Storyblok was:

• Its customization abilities
• Ease of use amongst content editors and implementation
• Pricing point

As developers do not need to relearn a new language or technology stack, this makes implementing and migrating to Storyblok as a solution easy, while handing over facilities and ease of use to content editors not only to learn the system but to create, edit and manage content seamlessly and intuitively. Meanwhile, Storyblok’s ability to easily customize existing elements to adapt to different content, while creating new elements with ease provided a key opportunity to money.com.au’s previous issues.

As money.com.au is currently a small start-up, every person on their team uses Storyblok. Breaking down the roles of who uses what, their CEO, Head of Product, Kaz Kennedy, and content editors use it to add, reuse, manage and create content in order to generate leads. Consequently, their developers use it to create and innovate with building new components to use across different new page creations. As a result, Co-Founder and developer Shaun McGowan cites the overall impact Storyblok has had on their site performance as taking back control of their SEO while propelling their site to market with new products, brands, and content changes with speed. New content can be easily created, while any additional content to pages can seamlessly be in line with the brand’s look and feel, with McGowan adding “Anyone can do it and we know it will be SEO and brand-compliant.”

money.com.au’s success

Currently, money.com.au is looking to also implement Storyblok’s solution to their sister company, Lend. Overall, the team at money.com.au were able to measure the value that Storyblok brought in the control and management of their SEO, propelling them amongst rankings while providing the ability to free up their developers’ hands from creating content, to actually innovating and spending their time on precious development and creation of new elements, freeing up turnaround time to an improvement of 100%. This in turn gave much more control in the brand’s storytelling to the product, design, and content editing team to champion money.com.au’s key problem-solving opportunity in Australia’s loaning market. Alongside that, the organization was also able to drive their go-to-market strategy with new pages and content quickly and efficiently with Storyblok’s ability to adapt and reuse content.