Forty WordPress sites, one Contentful platform

Standardising the sites would still have left forty codebases, each with its own theme and plugin set to keep current, and every new park would have added another. One Contentful content model feeding a shared Next.js front end gives editors a single place to publish and gives the estate a single release process. A new property onboards onto the existing platform and adds no new codebase to maintain.

The plugins are gone. Forty separate WordPress installations meant forty plugin inventories, each on its own update cadence and each needing someone to keep it current. The park sites are now generated from a shared Next.js front end that reads from Contentful, so no park site runs a plugin of its own. Site features come from the shared front end, and a change to them ships in one platform release that every park receives.

Every property publishes from a single shared content model in Contentful. Brand-level content is entered once and appears across the estate without being re-entered for each site, while property-specific fields stay with that property. Editors at every park work in one system with one set of conventions, where they previously used forty admin panels that each had a slightly different theme.

Booking, availability and guest services run separately from Contentful, behind the Next.js front end that every park site shares. Because those services sit outside the CMS, a booking change ships on its own schedule and a content change ships on its own, and none of the booking services depends on a CMS plugin. Editors can publish at any time without waiting on a booking release.

The team designed the shared content model first and then moved properties off WordPress onto the platform in phases. Each cut-over involved one property, so the team could watch it and roll it back if needed while the rest of the estate kept running. The phased approach also tested the content model against real properties early, while changes to the model were still cheap to make.

A headless CMS does not suit every multi-site estate. It pays off when many sites share most of their content model and the main cost is duplicated maintenance, which describes the NRMA Parks and Resorts estate. Where sites differ in structure, or one small editorial team works well in a single install, the gain from consolidation is smaller. A useful first step is to measure how much of an estate repeats the same content and templates.