In order to improve their time to market and offer the team a better developer experience, the DocuSign development team decided to re-architect their marketing site, and ultimately migrate from Drupal to a modern stack. The goal, as DocuSign team lead Grant Glidewell put it, was to “get the infrastructure out of the way,” and empower their development team to ship better web experiences, faster.
Their new headless approach uses a mix of homegrown APIs, Contentful, Next.js, and Netlify.
Goals and Requirements for DocuSign’s Jamstack Migration
As a global company, DocuSign operates in many markets. Their goal for the re-architecture project was to migrate the homepage, business-critical product pages, and some brand experience pages over to Netlify across all markets. More specifically, they wanted to:
Navigate away from Drupal to improve Developer Experience
In order to hire and retain development talent, the team sought to modernize the development workflow, and make working on DocuSign.com an excellent experience for developers. They also wanted CI/CD tools that aren’t available on a monolith.
Use Tools that Meet DocuSign’s Security and Performance Needs
DocuSign’s security process requires thorough vendor evaluation before handing over the keys to DNS and SSL, so the team needed to use trusted, vetted tools. They also had a requirement of 99.99% uptime, and fast page load speeds, which Netlify delivers with High Performance Edge.
“Keep it simple, and get out of the way of your developers. Let them do what they do best.” – Grant Glidewell, Senior Software Engineer, DocuSign
Empowering Developers with Netlify’s Workflow
25% of visitors to the homepage now receive the experience built and delivered with Netlify. As they continue to A/B test and iterate, the plan is to leave Drupal behind and build all marketing sites–and eventually eCommerce pages–with a headless approach.
What will those sites look like, and what tools will the team use to build them? With Netlify at the foundation of their Jamstack architecture, the possibilities are endless. By choosing Netlify, DocuSign developers can now use best-of-breed tools across the ecosystem to build what the business needs, with the workflows they love. As Grant puts it:
“[DocuSign developers] have the flexibility within [DocuSign’s] stack and all of Netlify to build with whatever you want. We can put it out on the Internet and feel confident in that.” – Grant Glidewell, Senior Software Engineer, DocuSign
To learn more about DocuSign’s migration project, watch the full video of the conversation at a recent customer event with Netlify customers DocuSign and Tinder.
