A headless Contentful website showcasing Ideal Heating components, spare parts and stockists

To ditch Magento for Contentful along with a modern redesign.

With the Magento site gathering dust, costing unnecessary time and money to maintain, and sporting an old Ideal Heating design, it was clearly time for an upgrade.

Ideal also required a platform which was easier to maintain and improve on continually, this agility is something they’ve been missing with Magento which will be relied upon in the near future.

With a business-wide effort to move all web properties to a Contentful-backed stack, we knew we needed to follow suit with Ideal Parts. The new brand guidelines needed to be incorporated into the new frontend too, bringing the aesthetic in line with other new Ideal Heating frontends.

With the parts data taken care of, we started to get to work on the frontend. We chose the Gatsby framework for this, and this enabled us to re-use some components from other Ideal Heating projects already in the latest design language. A key consideration for the frontend was on-the-go mobile use, primarily by installers on the job who want to quickly know some information on a part. To facilitate this we brought in Algolia as the search provider – this provides instant search functionality with intelligent partial matching.

The final piece of the puzzle was hosting. After much research and testing we chose Vercel for this, which has been easy to use, reliable and cost effective.