A CMS for static websites

With six languages and multiple domains, the old WordPress stack was not reliable enough for Oberlo’s plans. As a content-heavy website, the team decided to go static for better performance and accessibility.

Having many in-house content editors and freelancers and plenty of legacy content to convert, they needed a headless CMS.

Why DatoCMS

The teams at Shopify had already tried a couple of headless CMS before, with mixed results.

“We found other headless CMSs kind of a little bit daunting just to get started, and we didn’t want to spend too much time learning all the intricacies of systems that felt bloated and big,” says Frank Reding, senior developer at Oberlo.

While exploring their options and searching for a CMS that could work well with their static site generator of choice, 11ty, they bumped into DatoCMS, and the feature-set was just right for them.

“Immediately, DatoCMS ticked all the boxes without being overwhelming,” Frank adds. The pricing structure of DatoCMS was also crucial for them: “we could experiment with it without having to get way up the chain to get approval,” remarks Frank.

A CMS for content kings

DatoCMS’s clean user interface and ease of use are crucial for Oberlo, which lives and dies on its content quality and output. Content editors can now write and publish pages without developers’ help, with integrated services like Mux for streaming and imgix for image manipulation that do the heavy lifting for them.

Lazy loading, progressive images, and static pages changed performance dramatically: the homepage went from 15 seconds to interactive to less than one second.

“Our performance has gone through the roof since we went to static. Even with all the caching layers and the work done on WordPress, it was never going to reach this level,” says Frank.