Totaljobs Group

Effective enterprise WordPress development and bespoke content publishing

How do you solve the problem of a consistent content management system across multiple brands with a global audience?

In 2016 Totaljobs were looking at harmonising their content publishing platform and were exploring options around using WordPress to do so. Being part of the wider Stepstone group meant the solution needed to span multiple brands. During an initial consultancy period there were questions around structuring of database content, page builders, UI consistency and multilingual solutions.

Over the last five years we have helped their WordPress product manager solve those problems and have become integrated into their product team.

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Questions and problems we helped solve during the project

  1. How should data be structured within a WordPress application?

    When considering how best to publish large amounts of content, it’s important to consider how to structure that data within a WordPress environment. Getting content into WordPress is relatively easy, but reusing that content and getting it out again for other purposes is more complex. Through a series of on-site consultancy days we helped weigh up the pros and cons of various page builders versus a more structured implementation via Advanced Custom Fields.

  2. How can WordPress’s content editing interface be improved and optimised?

    When we start thinking of content editing in WordPress, there are a number of solutions from Block Editor to commercial page builders. It’s often a balancing act between offering content editors flexibility and freedom to produce engaging content versus ensuring structure and consistency. Page builders offer ultimate flexibility of content by allowing all kinds of adjustments to styles and layouts, but when brand consistency is key we’ll often recommend more structured page templates and fixed styles. For Totaljobs the latter was the correct decision as it ensured high quality content could be produced across multiple brands and instances of WordPress.

  3. How can WordPress be made more consistent for content editors?

    Totaljobs wanted a consistent, structured and easy to understand user interface for content editors. The dashboard of WordPress is simple to use, but removing clutter and making editing screens consistent was a key goal. WordPress has the required filters and hooks to enable this which meant we were able to redesign screens within the dashboard that would be unaffected by major WordPress updates.

  4. How can we make WordPress as fast as possible in an enterprise environment?

    WordPress is monolithic, meaning its frontend and backend and tightly woven together, which can lead to poor performance if not managed properly. Whilst headless WordPress is a solution, it can lose the ability to preview content as it is being produced which is a vital tool for content editors. We optimised the product’s frontend for Core Web Vitals and worked with Totaljobs’ dev ops team to solve backend performance problems.

  5. What should the infrastructure and deployment process look like?

    In a large enterprise environment with many other systems and products being used, it is incredibly difficult to ensure that there is consistency of infrastructure and CI/CD setup. We provided recommendations for WordPress instance hosting, deployment processes and branching strategy which improved the development and deployment process for WordPress across thirteen brands within Stepstone.

We required WordPress best practice for database structure, workflow management and multilingual, which Jonny at 10 Degrees provided through a number of days of on-site consultancy. 10 Degrees’ expert advice was invaluable in helping us make strategic decisions on the configuration of our enterprise CMS.”

Brett Ackroyd

Product Owner

Totaljobs

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