Since its premiere in 2012 by Prisa News, the Spanish edition of HuffPost had used the same content management technology as its eight international versions, including the original North American edition, founded by Arianna Huffington in the U.S. in 2007.
The content manager was a CMS fully adapted to HuffPost. It has specific solutions for its design, the advertising inventory and the need to combine an important web edition with a very high distribution orientation in social networks and search engines.
When Prisa News made the decision to switch to Xalok, four simultaneous challenges were put on the table, which the project had to face:
“How do we guarantee that HuffPost’s audience will not drop after the CMS change?”
Key decisions: The technical-functional document
The technical-functional document of the project was produced in record time thanks to the collaboration of representatives of Editorial, Product, Business and Technology from Prisa, and specialists from Hiberus. This was to maintain all the functionality of the current HuffPost website, but integrating it with the capabilities of the Xalok CMS.
During this stage, the content structure of the new HuffPost was updated, the metadata was renewed to optimize the search engine positioning of the different types of content, the multichannel distribution was defined (web, social networks, RSS, sitemaps, AMP, instant articles), the integrations were listed and the precise definition of all the functionality of the website was completed.
What makes the “Life” section so special? Why is “Virales” a tag and not a section? Which criteria should be followed to list the contents in automatic modules?
The extensive knowledge of the Prisa News team of the features, needs and possibilities of HuffPost and the experience of Hiberus team managed to answer all the questions of this stage, to reflect in a 65-page document the decisions and definitions that were to guide the technical development of the new website in Xalok.
And some of these decisions were going to be essential in determining the final outcome of the project:
3, 2, 1 … ‘Big bang’
January 17, 2023, was the date indicated. Given the characteristics of the website and the size of the wording, the project team opted for a big bang launch; that is, the DNS is changed at a set time and the new site completely becomes airborne and publicly accessible to all users.
«How do I know if the website I see is the new or the old one?» This question from one of HuffPost’s business team members at the time of the big bang showed just how far the website with Xalok had achieved its goal. The editorial team matched the same cover to the two CMS and, barring a small change in a story, it was difficult for the untrained eye to tell the difference.
The question that defined the success of the project: «How do I know if the website I see is the new or the old one?» Within minutes, the new site experienced a productive stress test. Four processes coincided in the time it took to direct traffic to the new GCP infrastructure, set up by Hiberus team:
As one of the analysts said just 15 minutes after the big bang: «It looks good: it started well».
So it was, in fact. From the very beginning, all website indicators showed an improvement, both in terms of traffic and indexing and performance. The results obtained just a week after the launch were remarkable.
Audience — Consistently, traffic showed an increase in the number of users and page views, especially in traffic from search engines.
Crawling — The growth in petitions received by Google skyrocketed in the first few days, coinciding with a decline in response time: Google visited the new site more frequently and took less time to index it.
Crawling — Amount of queries and response time: There was an increase in pages available in AMP. Through the Google Search Console, the project team found that some thousands of URLs had a redirect scheduled from the original API. Several checks were made, and it was decided to delete the redirect. As a result, the problem was fixed in Search Console and thousands of URLs were properly detected as AMP.
AMP — Number of valid AMP pages indexed according to Google Search Console in HuffPost after the CMS change: Both the volume of pages and indexed videos went up in the days after release. The reason is that the new sitemaps gave visibility to content that was published but not indexed in search engines.
Pages — Volume of HuffPost indexed pages and indexed pages with videos: There was a sudden growth in the number of pages recognized as “usable” in the Google Search Console. It was one of the factors that allowed search engines to index more pages in less time.
Conclusion: Vision and Execution
To paraphrase Thomas Edison, “Vision without Execution is Hallucination” has become one of the most celebrated slogans of Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post.
A change that requires the vision of aligning technical, business, product and editorial decisions on the same plane demands precise execution. The installation of Xalok in the Spanish edition of HuffPost supports this same collection: Vision without Execution is Hallucination.
The first installation of Xalok dates from 2009, three years before the Spanish edition of HuffPost landed in Spain. Since then, more than 50 digital media worldwide are using Hiberus technology to create, edit and distribute their content.
The Spanish edition of HuffPost had been using the same technology on its website for over 10 years and had therefore consolidated a certain way of doing things. Renewing the CMS on an information site means changing its structure and therefore dealing with a delicate process of change management.
For more information about our CMS and content management trends, please contact David Torres, CEO, dtorres@xalok.com or visit our website: https://www.xalok.com/