How Ocean Finance Streamlines Content and Compliance with ButterCMS

Ocean Finance has been helping UK citizens match with credit cards, loans, mortgages, car financing, and countless other financial products for over 30 years. As a predominantly self-service business, users expect a seamless experience that feels fast, transparent, and secure. Ocean Finance’s overall design and content are extremely important to shaping that experience. 

For the longest time, Ocean Finance tried to maintain their own CMS in an attempt to check off a long list of boxes. However, they eventually realized it just wasn’t cutting it, and decided to go searching for a headless CMS that could provide their content team with direct control and enable their development team to focus on more meaningful features.

Once they chose ButterCMS, they never looked back. Ocean Finance now runs 50% of their site using ButterCMS and is in the process of migrating their landing pages over so that their content team can quickly produce new layouts that fit their design standards, all thanks to the global components feature. 

Ocean Finance also relies on the components library to help them make site-wide changes with ease, which is a must-have for staying ahead of reporting requirements and changing interest rates. Now, what used to take hours of valuable time away from their development team can now be handled independently by their content professionals, with just a few clicks. 

Since adopting ButterCMS, Ocean Finance is now seeing a consistently upward trend in their organic traffic with better control than ever over their publishing schedule and copy updates. 

Many years ago, Ocean Finance developed its own CMS to help them overcome some of its design and feature concerns. However, creating and maintaining an in-house CMS is an extremely daunting task, so it’s no surprise that it never truly got the love it needed. The team recalls that the user experience left much to be desired. 

The content team struggled to perform simple tasks, which led to the front-end developers getting bogged down with tickets for simple but time-consuming requests, like changing a single word or figure on a landing page. Ask any developer and they’ll be the first to admit that this overly simple work is quite uninspiring, and takes their focus away from far more important tasks. 

Not to mention, the old CMS had one single login user. So, whoever needed to make changes would delve into the CMS and start the convoluted process of completing whatever work they set out to do. Worse yet, there was no intuitive user interface or search functionality. To find a page, the team would have to trawl through a long and unorganized list to get to where they wanted to be.

Ocean Finance knew from the start that a headless CMS was the way to go as they needed to have great fluidity and adjustability with all of their content, like financial offers and interest rates. They recall looking at a handful of solutions but ultimately went with ButterCMS as they liked the ability to use components and collections to structure the website. The global components also helped seal the deal, helping them realize the on-the-fly changes they need to make. 

Once Ocean Finance decided to go with ButterCMS, they jumped right into the onboarding process. They took a very self-service approach, reaching out to support when there were specific issues they faced that posed roadblocks in adoption. “The ButterCMS team has always been very much part of our team. All the support agents have been quick to get back to us,” McBurney explains. 

The initial migration of pages was predominantly a developer-led process. They asked their team to match their designs using ButterCMS’s components and template systems to create pages and collections. Of course, once the development team got things in order, the content team found itself easily able to step in and publish pages on their own. Plus, keeping the site in compliance is now a breeze. 

As a financial company, Ocean Finance is required to issue quarterly updates on things like APR rates displayed throughout the site. They also need to make legal text amendments on a regular basis. Since adopting ButterCMS, these requirements are no longer a headache to fulfill. 

Whereas the development team used to have to update the same figures across multiple pages manually, the content team can now make all the changes on their own with a singular adjustment. They simply use collections internally to manage global variables that they need to be able to update simultaneously. Ocean Finance wouldn’t be able to realize this efficiency without using the features found within ButterCMS. 

Since the development team has now been relieved of these minor and tedious tasks, they now have more time in their day to focus on what matters. They’re now able to invest their efforts into functionality improvements that bring real value to Ocean Finance and its users. 

In the meantime, the team is now in the process of migrating landing pages over to ButterCMS, allowing them to grow beyond the static pages that they are currently dealing with. In the existing setup, they have to go in and change the code in order to update the page, and they have to do that with every new advertising campaign or page idea that they’re working with. 

ButterCMS enables them to essentially duplicate an existing landing page, generate a new URL, and change the words with ease. Plus, the reusable components and dynamic component picker allow them to build different layouts that are consistent with the rest of the site, but not identical. 

“Very quickly, we've got brand new landing pages without going through the strenuous dev and QA processes we’ve been dealing with,” McBurney says.

Today, about half of the company’s website runs on ButterCMS, which the team says is a big win. As they’ve migrated pages into ButterCMS, they’ve been able to hand them over to their content team entirely, giving them more visibility and control than ever before. 

From an SEO standpoint, Ocean Finance has even been able to improve content production and internal linking since the content team has total oversight of the copy for the first time ever. 

Towards the end of last year, the team says they took a bit of a hit with their organic traffic due to the algorithm changes, but they were able to adjust quickly and restore their rankings through agile content updates. Overall, they’ve seen a fairly consistent upwards trend in organic traffic since moving to ButterCMS, since it has allowed them to put more focus on their content.  

“It seems any team managing medium to large amounts of content, or teams working with dynamic pages with frequent updates would benefit from a headless CMS.” says Nick.

If Ocean Finance had not implemented ButterCMS when they did, they’d be falling behind. Their development team would continue to be bogged down by tedious work while their content team struggled to stay on top of changing SEO priorities. They also say they likely wouldn’t have migrated to NuxtJS, and they feel that their modernized tech stack has led to major performance improvements across the board from a user experience standpoint. 

All in all, ButterCMS has enabled Ocean Finance to revamp their approach, in turn improving development speed, content production, organic traffic, and conversion rates — all of which have contributed to increased revenue. Going forward, Ocean Finance will continue migrating more pages over to ButterCMS with a focus on streamlining and simplifying existing workflows even further. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how ButterCMS can help your business, schedule a live demo or take it for a spin today with a free trial.