Monotype Chooses Stack vs Suite with Drupal on Pantheon
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Introduction
If you know Calibri but prefer Arial for your copy, you know Monotype. An iconic provider of font services, Monotype has over 40,000 fonts in its libraries. From the M&M’S® playful typeface to Duolingo’s custom font with wings, Monotype helps many companies define their brand and character.
For Pantheon, Monotype recommended the font with “a flare but also reliable, dependable and clean.” Those qualities were exactly what brought Monotype to Pantheon when it needed the support, services and resources required to meet its organic traffic growth goals – things the company’s legacy DXP failed to provide.
Approach
Monotype chose Drupal as the solution due to its flexibility and the ability to put its design stamp on its content hub. The company leveraged Pantheon as its WebOps platform, attracted by its reliable and dependable support.
- 1 CMS
- Instead of original four
- 99%
- Cache hit ratio
- 0.5M
- Monthly visitors
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WebOps Tools to Power Traffic Growth
Monotype has four websites, which function is to help creative teams succeed in a digital-first environment. That means lead generation at monotype.com with its half a million visitors per month looking for inspiration in the company’s font stories, ebooks and webinars. That means e-commerce at myfonts.com, which sells families of fonts to individual customers. That means pipeline generation at monotypefonts.com and enteprise.monotype.com for enterprise clients.
Pantheon has done great things for the overall performance of our Drupal sites. If we didn’t have Pantheon, it would be like trying to learn how to ride a bicycle that didn’t have its tires on!”
- Mackenzie Pollock, Senior Digital Experience Product Manager, Monotype
From building out instances to fixing bugs, 13 technical squads support a large Digital Experience team and half a dozen of marketers. Their favorite feature is Custom Upstreams, Pantheon’s centralized management system for governing a portfolio of related but independent CMS instances. “Custom Upstreams gives us the ability to just push the code once instead of having to do it over and over again on different domains,” said Pollock with a smile.
Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN is a close second favorite. This suite of edge-configuration tools helps Monotype’s revenue-generating sites achieve great speed, performance and security. After half a year on Pantheon, Monotype landed a 99% cache hit ratio, which meant very little waiting time for users requesting content on the site. Their First Contentful Paint took 1.6 seconds to load the page, a measure of good user experience.
Between those two functionalities and Pantheon’s enterprise-grade security, time savings have amplified for the developers. They now have no problem supporting the marketing team with daily content updates and A/B testing.
Most recently, the Digital Experience team enhanced demand generation on Monotype.com:
"We have some great content on our site, from webinars and podcasts to case studies and educational content. We didn't want to introduce a subscription-based model where customers have to pay to consume our content, so instead we introduced gated content where we just ask customers for their email to access. Between that and our improvement in site performance, traffic to the site has been continually growing.”
Why Drupal?
Before Drupal, the company was running at least four different CMSs. It was complicated and decentralized. On the recommendation of an agency, Monotype chose Drupal and stood up their content hub, monotype.com, as their first site. “It made sense because it was purely content and we liked the freedom we had over it. We are a design company, and we liked that we could put our thumbprint on it. And as that grew, more and more teams who were working on other sites garnered interest in Drupal and started using it themselves.”
The Drupal.org community had a lot to contribute to the chain effect.
There's a lot of energy and passion and excitement in the community. You could go into Drupal.org if you are running into a problem, post a question and there's a good chance in 24 hours somebody's going to respond. My teams love it!”
- Mackenzie Pollock, Senior Digital Experience Product Manager, Monotype
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