Multi-Region Headless CMS Rebuild for a Global Dairy Brand

The request sounded simple — “refresh our recipe and product sites” — until we found out it covered 15 country domains, three legacy CMSs, and over 40,000 localized recipe pages. Page speed lagged, content editors waited days for code deploys, and each campaign hard-forked the front-end.

We proposed a progressive rebuild: lift the content into a headless CMS, reuse proven Razor components where possible, layer Vue.js for interactive recipe tools, and host the stack on Azure’s global edge. In six sprints, we migrated the first market (Sweden), proved sub-second Core Web Vitals, and earned the mandate to roll out the same pattern across every country site, with zero public downtime.

• Solution Architect (CMS & Azure architecture)
• 2 Back-End Engineers (C# / ASP.NET Core, Razor)
• Front-End Engineer (Vue.js 2, component library)
• QA Automation Engineer
• DevOps Engineer (Azure DevOps, IaC, CDN)
• Content Migration Specialist
• Project Manager

• Triple-stack CMS debt. Old PHP, .NET WebForms, and a custom editor meant each region had its own release cycle.
• Heavy recipe pages. High-res images, nutrition widgets, and video embeds pushed first-paint beyond four seconds on mobile.
• Localization sprawl. 40,000+ recipe slugs, product bios, and sustainability articles required SEO-safe redirects and language tagging.
• Editor pain. Marketing teams waited as long as three days for a developer to push simple text updates.
• Peak-season spikes. Holiday recipe traffic surged 10× and often pushed the servers into throttling.
• Strict brand governance. Each country team needed its own palette and layout variants, without forking code.

• Backend: ASP.NET Core + Razor: reusable components and layout partials across all markets.
• Frontend: Vue.js 2: interactive tools like recipe scaler and ingredient search embedded into Razor views.
• CMS: Headless CMS hosted on Azure: GraphQL API for localized, multi-language content delivery.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Azure App Service + Azure Front Door CDN: global caching, autoscaling, high availability.
• DevOps: Azure DevOps, Bicep (Infrastructure-as-Code), blue-green deployments.
• Monitoring & Performance: Application Insights, Lighthouse CI — real-time metrics and CI-based page speed gates.

• Strangler page migration. Each country domain moved behind Azure Front Door; unmatched routes fell back to legacy until their templates were ported.
• Component library. Brand-safe Razor/SCSS components (hero, nutrition table, sustainability badge) are themed using JSON tokens — one codebase, multiple visual styles.
• Edge-optimized media. Image renditions and WebP fallbacks served from Azure Blob Storage with automatic height/width hints; Largest Contentful Paint dropped under 1.2s.
• Live preview for editors. Content teams preview real site behavior inside the CMS; a webhook sends drafts to a staging slot in under 20 seconds.
• Autoscale & cost guardrails. Front Door rules cache recipe pages for 24 hours; App Service instances scale to four during peaks, back to one overnight, trimming hosting spend by 35%.

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

• Mobile stickiness restored. First-paint now lands below one second, trimming bounce rate by 22% and lifting average recipe dwell time to 2 m 15 s — directly boosting ad-inventory value.
• Editorial agility unlocked. Country teams publish or localise content in minutes; the recent midsummer campaign rolled out across five regions same day with zero developer involvement.
• Consistent brand, local nuance. A shared component library guarantees typography, nutrition call-outs, and sustainability badges remain on-brand while colour palettes, pricing, and promotions adapt per market.
• The budget was reallocated. Retiring three legacy CMS licences and two image-hosting contracts financed new interactive tools and SEO work without raising OPEX.
• Stress-free peak seasons. Holiday spikes that once triggered code freezes now pass unnoticed; dashboards show stable latency and spare headroom instead of emergency pager alerts.

TECHNICAL OUTCOMES

• Performance held to account. 95th-percentile LCP averages 1.1s; a Lighthouse CI gate blocks any pull request that adds over 100 ms of load time.
• Fault-free delivery. Twenty-two blue-green deployments over six months completed without a single public 5xx; Application Insights traces confirm error budgets remain above 98%.
• Elastic cost control. Azure Front Door caches 85% of traffic; App Service instances scale from one to four during surges and idle back overnight, cutting hosting spend by 35%.
• Audit-ready content lineage. Every publish event stores a content hash and locale tag; rollbacks and SEO-safe redirects are generated automatically in the headless CMS.
• Single codebase, rapid velocity. Fifteen country domains run on a single repository with a unified DevOps pipeline that promotes from staging to production in under eight minutes, shrinking the merge-to-live window from days to minutes.