Jacada Travel’s move to a headless CMS

StrategiQ isn’t just a marketing agency that delivers services, we’re a partner that delivers growth. In the nine years that we’ve been working with Jacada Travel, we’ve partnered with them in growing their customer base, their revenue and supported them in joining the Wilderness Travel family in September 2020. 

PROBLEM

With an elite clientele, it’s vital that Jacada provides the very best across the board. This expectation is never more present than with the experience provided by their digital  interface. Designed to inspire with an array of stunning imagery and insights on incredible travel experiences, it’s been a large focus of our collaboration over the years. Whilst a commitment to ongoing development and UX/UI improvements delivered a premium customer experience, we were aware that behind the scenes, every new destination and new content piece added was making site management more challenging and less efficient.  

As businesses grow and their requirements evolve, it is common for websites to grow with various additions and work-arounds. Whilst this presents an immediate solution, over time it results in a system that becomes increasingly complex. 

This had become the case with the Jacada site, where it was becoming more challenging to roll out global changes and make technical SEO improvements. Site administrators were finding content management was becoming unwieldy with an enormous image library and vast amount of content throughout pages and posts and legacy templates that were no longer fit for purpose. Something needed to change to ensure that the website could continue to facilitate Jacada’s ongoing growth.

SOLUTION

StrategiQ  proposed that a redevelopment project to move to a headless solution would address the management issues that site administrators were experiencing, and futureproof the content management process to be fit for any future user interface (UI). Because our work with Jacada encompasses an ongoing commitment to design and development, the site didn’t need redesigning, which enabled this development to be undertaken more rapidly, as designs were in place.

Headless solutions are designed for growth. They act as a middleware layer, where content is managed and can be shared across any number of user interfaces or content channels, improving efficiencies and performance. By cutting down on legacy data and optimising valuable data through the move to a headless CMS, we could achieve significant speed improvements to optimise the administration experience and overall delivery.

In the move to headless our development team employed a number of tools and integrations including:

• bespoke integration into HubSpot to pull in and flag contact form data for action
• integration with digital asset management platform Canto to better curate the immense image library
• Gutenberg blocks to convert legacy content data into a newer format
• Faust.JS for website build
• GraphQL to query and retrieve data
• custom caching tools to help improve website performance
• geolocation technology to serve users trip costs in their local currency and local contact details.

Our team also used an extensive range of WP Engine tools and their supported hosting service to ensure the stability of the solution for the long term. Our solutions are consistently built to optimise performance and the application of SEO strategies.

NEW FUTURE VALUE

The new platform is not only making administration and creation tasks more efficient, it’s also contributing to growth and achieving new future value. The first quarter’s performance indicates that revenue is forecasted to be +17% YoY as a result of a 7% increase in deals and average trip values. 

Within a month of launch (10th March 2025+) , all major metrics relevant to the improvements were trending  positively, with stats across the board demonstrating an improved experience for front end users. This included:

• Time To First Byte (TTFB) improved by 76.9%.
  TTFB measures the speed at which a web browser receives the first byte of data from a server in response to a request, another measure of page load speed which reflects the use of a more responsive server.  
• First Contentful Paint (FCP) also increased by 34.4%.
  Another indication of the improved speed at which users see the first piece of content. 
• Core Web Vital (CWV) stats reported zero pages in ‘need (of) improvement’ or that were deemed ‘poor’, whilst 2,867 URLs were classed as ‘good’ on mobile and 2,901 on desktop.