Traeger Grills Tastes More Conversions with Headless CMS from Amplience on AWS

As Traeger began modernizing its ecommerce platform, finding a solution that could personalize the experience to each customer—without compromising site performance—was a key requirement. The company decided on a headless CMS because it would provide more flexibility for Traeger’s developers to customize its site, application, and in-grill interface. A headless CMS focuses solely on content management and does not handle the user-facing presentation layer. Content is shared via APIs and developers can render it in a variety of formats, allowing for more flexibility in designing user experiences.

With its existing technology stack, developers could only release new website functionality twice a month. However, this pace wasn’t sustainable as Traeger gained more market share and the site gained more traction. “Everything was starting to really bust at the seams, so to speak,” said Ryan Newman, EVP of Technology at Traeger . “A lot of the impetus were issues with our speed and site performance, our ability to iterate and move quickly, and being able to leverage modern technologies like React and Vue.” For instance, updating the site to run a new sale was a costly process that took weeks or sometimes months.

After searching for the perfect-fit headless CMS, Traeger decided on Amplience. As an AWS Partner, Amplience brings together data, performance insights, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help brands deliver persuasive, personalized content for every shopping context.

Amplience uses a variety of AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Bedrock. It offers an API layer powered by Amazon API Gateway for moving content between the CMS and the frontend of Traeger’s site, application, and grills. “The API layer is the bridge that allows us to define key constructs that make up Traeger’s digital footprint, and then push that content to the appropriate screen at the appropriate time,” Newman said. For example, the Traeger website includes several content types and schema definitions. But Amplience acts as a framework for creating and choosing content so that marketing and sales teams can easily personalize the experience for customers. In addition, Traeger has begun experimenting with Amplience’s AI playground, which uses Amazon Bedrock to generate AI-driven shopping experiences. Traeger’s marketing and sales teams can take advantage of these generative AI capabilities to quickly create personalized landing pages and draft product copy.

The move to Amplience not only streamlined marketing efforts, it also afforded new flexibility for Traeger’s developers. “We've completely flipped the old delivery schedule on its head,” Newman said. “Ever since we launched, we've been able to make a release at least once a day and sometimes more.” This allowed the team to work through their backlog of new features and push more updates into production. “Amplience created a positive psychology—not only for our team—but also for the business to see the mobile app and the website as living, breathing things,” Newman said. By moving to a headless solution that separates the frontend from the backend, the team was also able to improve site performance. Overall, Traeger’s site now loads twice as fast as it did before Amplience. This—combined with upgrading the UX of the site—helped boost conversions in a big way.