Ruukki Site Speed Soars 700% with Progress Sitefinity and ASP.NET MVC

Ruukki Construction, a part of SSAB Inc., is a leading supplier of steel-based products and services for roofs and walls used in building sustainable buildings. The company has a strong presence in 10 European countries which enables it to serve customers out of local manufacturing sites. When Ruukki first consolidated its web presence on Progress® Sitefinity® from Sitecore and Episerver, the company enjoyed top performance. But technology changes over the ensuing years left the company’s digital experience lagging. Kiril Jovchev, CMS Competence Lead at Ruukki’s implementing partner, Siili, described the problem, “Five years ago, our Google page speed insights scored 70 or 80—all green, all good. Over time, this deteriorated to 10 out of 100. What was originally fast, was not fast according to current standards.” 

The lack luster site performance was negatively affecting search engine optimization (SEO) rankings and the customer experience. This, in turn, resulted in lower web-driven conversions and decreasing sales leads. Ruukki’s team sourced the primary issue back to its use of older ASP.NET Web Forms technology versus the newer ASP.NET MVC. Beyond that, Ruukki had undergone a company rebranding, GDPR legislation had passed—making updates to tracking requirements essential, and the company also wanted to expand accessibility features. There was a strong business case to update the site, but no content or design changes would matter if it couldn’t first address site performance.

Ruukki had several options to consider, including SAP which it already used for enterprise resource planning. But after consideration, the team determined the best approach was to keep Sitefinity as its content management system (CMS) and migrate from Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC, “With MVC, you can prioritize how the images JavaScript, CSS and overall delivery of the content load. The structure of the HTML is free of complexities, making it ideal for developers and for a highly optimized site.” 

Being experienced in MVC, Ruukki’s implementing partner made a straightforward Web Forms to MVC transition. “We rewrote the widgets that we had, but managed to keep all the integrations, the data models, the modules in the module builder and all the content in those. We did an information architecture facelift for the new brand and some of the content, but it wasn’t a big deal to recreate the pages,” said Jovchev.

The team also preserved Ruukki’s technical independence, “With Sitefinity, we can do most of the work on the website ourselves. We maintain more than 30 sites and launched campaigns with a fairly small team,” said Mika Autio, Web Manager of Ruukki Construction. “The template editing was something that no other CMS on the market could offer—and still doesn’t.”

Centralized management was key, given that Ruukki has both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) channels and a wide dealer network coming to Ruukki.com for product information, resources and documentation from many countries, speaking many languages. To efficiently run its business, the Ruukki site has vital integrations with SAP, Eloqua, AWS, InRiver and more than a few country-specific chat bots—making site performance critically important. The new site would dramatically improve and modernize the company’s overall digital experience.