Arduino needed to improve content management for its Educational section and all related products, because the legacy monolithic CMS it was using tied the team to a slow, cumbersome editorial workflow. Every time they built a new website, the development and editorial teams had to recreate content and pages from scratch, wasting a significant amount of time.

Their goal was to move to a CMS that would let them easily replicate sites and content while keeping performance excellent and security uncompromised. That is why they chose a headless CMS.

Headless CMSs are a growing market because they let you manage all your content from a single central hub. They are also API-first, so teams can work with their preferred development languages. The hard part is often finding an agency able to work with an architecture that is still relatively unexplored in the mainstream.

After choosing DatoCMS as its technology, Arduino reached out to Cantiere Creativo, the agency where the product was born.

The flexibility of DatoCMS and Cantiere Creativo's experience would allow Arduino to work on its content architecture while developing the interface in a reasonable timeframe, dramatically improving its workflow.

Cantiere Creativo developed a system that combines best-in-class speed with greater efficiency and cleaner code.

The homepage now loads in 2.4 seconds on average, a full 2.1 seconds faster than the education industry average. Yet the biggest leap forward came in how fast internal pages load.

Given the sheer volume of content and its many dependencies, the old system took up to 8 seconds to open each internal page, while the new structure loads them almost instantly, in milliseconds.

A substantial optimization effort also cut the codebase from 26,107 lines in the previous version to just 1,267 today, a 95.2% reduction.

A first project was built with DatoCMS and React (the new language Facebook is built on), so it could then serve as a foundation for other projects by "duplicating" the shared parts.

React displays content much faster than other languages because it does so intelligently, loading only the parts of the interface that change from one page to the next.

The language is highly modular, so it's easy to take apart and reassemble at will, delivering many different solutions with small changes.

Like React, DatoCMS makes flexibility its key strength, thanks to features such as "Modular Blocks", which let you create content blocks that can be placed anywhere in a page's structure and reused effortlessly.

"Thanks to the platform's flexibility and great support from Cantiere Creativo, it was easy to integrate the mockups created by our design team and tailor the platform to our needs," says Ernesto López Canelón, hardware designer and product owner at Arduino.

DatoCMS also supports strict validation rules, so the editorial team can work on content without fear of breaking anything when new content is published.

Arduino was enthusiastic about the product, but at first the team found it hard to enter content correctly. After a joint review of the pain points, Cantiere Creativo's CTO and project manager flew to Arduino's two European offices (Malmö and Turin) for four days of training, wrapping up with a workshop designed to streamline the work.

"Onboarding was a bit of a challenge for the team at first, but after the training sessions and ongoing support from Cantiere Creativo, we're now much more confident working with DatoCMS and more aware of its potential," says Carla Muñoz Sedze, product owner of Arduino CTC GO!

The workshop was also a chance to exchange ideas and listen, so that the relationship between Cantiere and Arduino would go beyond content architecture alone.

The conversations were so productive that they sparked new joint projects between the two Italian companies:

Arduino and Cantiere continue to collaborate on a range of projects, including the plugins conceived during the four days of training.