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Ascensus

How Ascensus scaled from 3 to 45 websites on a single platform?

One small team, 45 separate brands. Everything the brands share is built once, and only the brand itself changes.

 

A website for every state

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Ascensus is a US financial services company. It helps families save for college, for retirement, and for disability costs.

Its college savings business works state by state, mainly on their 529 plans. Each US state offers its own savings plan, and each plan has its own website and its own brand. So Ascensus does not run one website. It runs about 45, and they all look different.

These sites are where savers land first. They explain what the plan is and why it is worth joining. They sit separately from the apps where people open and manage their accounts.

One more thing matters here. Most of these brands are not Ascensus's own. Each site belongs to a state or to a partner financial firm. If a site goes down, Ascensus does not just fix it. It has to explain it to a client.

45
websites

1
platform

99.9%
uptime promised

45 brands, one small team

Mire

Forty-five brands is a lot for a small team. Forty-five brands that belong to someone else is harder.

Every site looks different, because every state and every partner wants its own identity. That is the trap in multi-brand work. If each brand is treated as its own project, you end up maintaining 45 of everything: 45 sets of code, 45 things to patch and upgrade, and a separate build every time one brand wants a new page type.

The work also arrives from four directions at once. Ascensus's own marketing teams send designs for the sites they own. Partner firms and their agencies send landing page requests and content edits through Ascensus account managers. Direct clients send changes the same way. And the product teams need content for their apps.

Because the brands belong to clients, none of that work can be loose. Nothing reaches a live site without going through a single team that knows what each brand allows. Governance is not paperwork here. It is the reason a state can trust Ascensus with its plan.

On top of that, these are state contracts. They promise 99.9% uptime. A site that goes down is not an internal problem. It is a client problem.
The old system could not carry any of this. It could not build responsive sites, so the team maintained two versions of every site: one for desktop, one for mobile. Making a single page meant creating a separate file for every image and PDF first, often ten or more before starting the page itself.

One platform that could hold 45 sites

Target

Ascensus needed one platform that could hold many separate sites at once. Not a platform per brand, and not one big site pretending to be many.

It also needed to keep everything on its own servers, in its own data centres, to hit the uptime it had promised its state clients. And it needed to be able to change the platform itself, not just configure it.

The uptime requirement was the hardest part. Ascensus runs Jahia in two data centres, one on each US coast, and publishes content from one to the other. If one coast fails, the other keeps the sites up. That publishing feature was new at the time, and Jahia built it out to fit Ascensus's setup. One architecture, built once, protects all 45 brands.

"Jahia was the only one really that would step into that level of sophistication that was needed, because we had contractual SLAs of 99.9%."
- Director of Software Engineering, Ascensus 

Build once, change only the brand

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Here is what makes 45 brands manageable. Ascensus builds what the brands have in common once, and lets only the brand change.

The team does not build 45 websites. It builds one set of components (a hero banner, a comparison table, a contact block) and keeps them in code. Each component can have several looks: different layout, different styling. When someone places a component on a page, they pick the look that matches that brand.

One set of building blocks. Forty-five different-looking sites.

So the split is clean. Shared once across all 45 sites: the components, the code, the publishing path, the uptime architecture, and the team's skills. Unique to each site: the design, the content, the brand. Nothing brand-specific gets built twice, and nothing shared gets rebuilt per brand.

A new plan site becomes mostly a new arrangement of parts that already exist. A new component becomes available to all 45 sites at once.

Governance runs the same way: one path, not 45. Every request becomes a ticket, goes onto one board, and is worked by one team, whatever brand it belongs to. Ascensus can hold a consistent standard across 45 client brands because there is only one place where changes happen.

The same Jahia also feeds content to Ascensus's apps. Content sits in one Jahia site, sorted into folders by brand. An automated job pulls each folder out through Jahia's API, turns it into a file, and passes it on to the apps. Those apps were built in Angular and were never rebuilt around Jahia. They simply read content that Jahia produces. So one platform covers both the websites and the content behind the products.

The result

List

In 2015 Ascensus launched on Jahia with 3 branded sites and about 70,000 visitors a month. Today it runs around 45 sites. The biggest one, New York, drew roughly 10 million visitors last year on its own.

The team did not grow to match. That is the return on sharing components. Adding a brand does not mean adding a build.

There is also only one platform to keep track of. One place to patch, one place to upgrade, one set of skills to hire for, instead of 45. Ascensus never added a second content platform for this business, even as the brand count grew fifteen times over.

And the sites have stayed up.
 

"We have brand reputation on the line at any given time. We haven't had any significant outages. Anything that we've ran into, Jahia has been there promptly to support us"

— Director of Software Engineering, Ascensus

What this project shows

Managing many brands does not mean managing many platforms. Ascensus went from 3 brands to 45 on the same platform, with the same small team. Forty-five brands did not have to mean 45 of everything.

The work is not building the sites. It is deciding what the sites share. Ascensus shares components, code, the publishing path and the uptime architecture. It keeps design, content and brand separate per site. Everything shared is built once and reused 45 times.

Getting that split right is what keeps growth manageable. When a new brand is a configuration of parts that already exist, adding one is a task rather than a project, and the team does not have to grow with the brand count.

Governance gets easier too, not harder. One publishing path across 45 brands means one place to set standards and one place to check them. Running 45 separate builds would mean governing 45 separate practices.

Jahia gives Ascensus a common foundation that stays invisible to the brands sitting on it. Each state and partner gets a site that looks entirely its own. Underneath, they run on the same components, the same code, and the same uptime guarantee.

Do you run a lot of websites for clients or partners, with a small team and uptime you have to answer for?

See how Jahia helps one team manage many brands from one platform, with the governance to keep every brand consistent.

Talk to a Jahia expert