McCarthy & Stone

The client

McCarthy and Stone is the UK’s leading developer and manager of retirement communities. With over 40 years of experience of providing high-quality homes, they have delivered over 56,000 homes in the UK across more than 1,200 developments.

The McCarthy and Stone website allows buyers to search for homes by location. They can then select developments to learn more about, and request to receive updates via email, or brochure. The website is an essential part of the home-buying process for McCarthy and Stone customers.

The challenge

McCarthy and Stone were building a new website, which was being built on Sitecore V9 and hosted on Azure. UAT testing had revealed performance issues with the new site that the client was concerned about.

The client asked Just After Midnight to join the project as a 24/7 support partner to consult and manage their cloud hosting and ensure that the site would be ready to go live on time. 

The solution

The team of engineers at Just After Midnight began investigating the client’s hosting set up to understand what was causing the performance issues. After looking at the hosting set up that McCarthy and Stone had provisioned, our team found that the specification was correct and in fact more than what is necessary. This eliminated the idea that the performance issues were being caused by the architectural setup and turned to investigate the application set-up instead. Together with the partner agency, we were able to diagnose the Sitecore issue that had been causing the performance issues on the new site.

Since go-live, Just After Midnight has been supporting McCarthy and Stone’s Sitecore application and cloud infrastructure 24/7. This has ensured that any smaller issues with the new website are nipped in the bud before they had any impact on revenue and reputation.

Results

• Any issues on go-live day were dealt with immediately by the team
• 99.99% uptime since Just After Midnight took on support
• Both the client and agency were happy with our combined efforts and seamless teamwork to ensure a smooth go-live day