HELIOS

M AY 2 0 1 8

The Sun’s Headless Web Rendering Engine

Overview• Who we are?

• The History

• Helios

• What we have learnt

• What would we change

• The Future

The History• 2015

• Méthod + Escenic

• Behind a paywall

• Paywall removed Nov 2015.

• June 2016

• Migration to Wordpress VIP

What problems did we want to solve?

• Innovate and build capability to move faster

• Faster time to market for commercial initiatives

• Cost saving and scale

Goals

• A componentized client view that is decoupled from Wordpress

• Increase release cycle times

• Server / client shareable functionality

• Increased traffic and engagement

• Revenue

KPI’s

• Page Speed

• Time to First Paint

• Server Response Time

What is Helios?

The Approach

Wordpress Helios

Desktop Mobile

Page Load Speed 37% 14%

Time to First Paint 39% 47%

Server Response Time 48% 23%

User facing metrics

Learnings

• Monitoring is valuable

• Efficient caching is complicated

• Continually evaluate and change when required

• Do not underestimate complexity in working with multiple vendors

What would we change?

• Break away from Wordpress early

• Single Repo

• Have the foundation in place

Into the Future…

• Extend Helios to serve the remaining parts of the site

• Single Repo

• Pre-rendering