Future proofed
re-platforming
Sweetcombe Cottage Holidays
Re-platforming while maintaining BAU
Booking engine integration
Website re-platform
Sweetcombe Cottage Holidays is a family founded, self-catering agency based in and focusing on East Devon. Established over 35 years ago with just a handful of cottages, the company now markets more than 100 hand-picked holiday properties.
Sweetcombe came to us, following a recent redesign of their website, to help them overcome technical challenges related to their booking system.
Their website was a traditional, ‘monolithic’ site (large, singular entity that’s hard to change). The existing booking API - Tabs - was directly integrated into the CMS/frontend and all run on the same server, so when Tabs announced they were no longer supporting their API service, Sweetcombe knew this was the time for a new booking system and immediately identified with our recommendation to use a flexible, ‘headless’ architecture.
As specialists in website development and booking engine integration, we were the ideal partner to re-platform their website without impacting business-as-usual.
Built for the future
We built a GraphQL application to connect to their existing instance of Tabs. This application became the universal adaptor for booking data; somewhere that differing booking data responses are resolved into consistent GraphQL types which can be consumed by a Gatsby build.
As we didn’t design or build the existing site we created new, bespoke React components to replicate their existing styling, while making various tweaks and optimisations to the UX and UI. We used our components for search, filtering and checkout, saving time by not having to redevelop the site, whilst providing Sweetcombe with a faster and better search-optimised site.
When Sweetcombe had chosen the new booking engine to replace Tabs (iPro), we updated the GraphQL application to resolve and mutate the new Booking API data, allowing them to get used to how it works. When the team at Sweetcombe were ready, we disconnected Tabs and completed the re-platforming of the site now running on iPro.
WordPress and iPro handle all dynamic content and any data iPro doesn’t provide is captured via WordPress and made available to the components that require it, allowing Sweetcombe to include richer property content and for their marketing team to create landing pages to market new properties or news.
The benefits
This headless Content Management System (CMS) approach has multiple benefits:
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Future proofs the website platform meaning it is easy to switch to a new booking system or other data source in the future
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De-risks migration with a stepped process, keep existing systems running in parallel until new or upgraded systems are ready
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Saves money because booking system data is cached meaning there are fewer (chargeable) API calls required
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Increases the speed of the site as the build files are static, meaning near-instant page transitions. Any real-time data required is called on demand.
“By developing in a ‘headless’ fashion, we maintain the existing features and functions whilst making large-scale changes to the platform behind the scenes. This gives Sweetcombe the reassurance that their customer experience on the website is incrementally improved with no compromise.”
Ed Wilson – Senior Developer
