Hammerson cuts page launch time from days to hours with Prismic
Summary
- Hammerson is a leading owner, manager, and developer of sustainable urban real estate across Europe, including the landmark destination Birmingham Bullring and Grand Central.
- They saw an opportunity to build a new web platform that would let the team handling their day-to-day content create and update pages quickly, without relying on developers for routine changes.
- They partnered with development agency Firney to rebuild their sites on Prismic, whose intuitive, component-driven editing experience now lets content editors build and update pages independently, on a fast, high-performance front end.
The challenge: content updates slowed down by rigid workflows and developer reliance
Hammerson's fast-moving marketing team are responsible for setting up new tenants, updating retailer and dining information, publishing event content, and managing ongoing promotional activity across several shopping centre websites. Their marketing team wanted to build a new web platform that would give them flexibility without requiring engineering support for content changes, enabling them to create pages quickly. Their goal was to move quickly, manage a high volume of content; from new tenants and dining information to promotional events, and gain the autonomy to create pages, adjust layouts, and publish content instantly.
Hammerson also had a larger strategic goal: to introduce more monetisation options throughout their sites, including flexible areas for ads, promotional content, and event features. To make this possible, they needed a platform that allowed marketers to set up and configure these elements quickly while still protecting brand consistency and ensuring strong site performance.
They set out to find a content management experience that was intuitive, efficient, and built to empower marketers. Their goal was to reduce technical bottlenecks, simplify the process of implementing new designs, and give their team the freedom to bring ideas to life with far less operational overhead.
The solution: headless architecture and flexible editing experience
Hammerson chose Prismic for its headless architecture and intuitive editing experience, which together offered the ideal solution for their needs. The platform enabled a complete separation of concerns: their development partner, Firney, could focus on building a highly optimized, custom front end, while the team managing day-to-day content gained a single, powerful CMS to update content with ease.
- The intuitive editing experience: Prismic's clean interface and visual Page Builder were transformative for Hammerson’s content teams. They could easily create, preview, and publish rich content without needing technical support.
- Component-driven structure with slices: The entire solution was built on a library of reusable page sections (slices). This let content editors build dynamic, on-brand pages simply by assembling pre-approved blocks, keeping pages on-brand and dramatically speeding up page creation.
Adoption by the content editors was exceptionally fast. Thanks to the intuitive nature of Prismic, they required minimal training to become proficient, taking ownership of the sites' content from day one.
The results: faster publishing, independent launches, and faster pages
- Increased content velocity: The time required to build and launch a new page was reduced from days to hours, allowing the team to be far more agile.
- Reduced developer dependency: Content editors now handle content management almost entirely on their own, so routine updates rarely need a developer.
- Massive performance gains: A direct result of the headless architecture was a 4.5-second improvement in average page load times, leading to a better user experience and stronger SEO signals. Overall, pages are now 60% faster to load.
- Reliability at scale: Hammerson’s digital ecosystem now handles 1.4 million page views per month with ease, showing how well the new setup supports their high-traffic needs.
Bonus tip from Firney
Focus on empowering your content creators. The technology should serve the marketing team, not the other way around. Our recommendation is to adopt a component-driven strategy with a headless CMS like Prismic. By building a library of flexible, reusable content slices, you give your marketers the freedom to create and innovate quickly, while ensuring everything they produce is perfectly on-brand and high-performing.
When Firney was selected as the agency for Hammerson, we knew we needed a CMS that would deliver on development speed and long-term maintainability. Adopting Prismic has been incredible for our workflow. By combining its headless architecture and slices with Next.js components, we are building pages 2x faster. This component-driven approach has not only streamlined our development but also made the content entry experience a breeze for our client. Slices, in particular, have been a game-changer. Its 'build once, use everywhere' model gives us a library of reliable components, freeing us from the typical plugin conflicts and CMS-specific code that plague other platforms. The sites we're building are demonstrably faster and significantly easier to maintain. We highly recommend Prismic to any team looking for a truly fast, flexible, and reliable CMS.
