PaperCut, a global print management software provider, was facing significant challenges keeping their complex website infrastructure up-to-date. With over 4,000 web pages across six different systems — ranging from PHP, PmWiki, and MadCap Flare to the static site generator Hugo — making updates was slow and required either specialized technical skills or long delays. This resulted in key stakeholders across the business lacking the autonomy to make impactful changes.

After assessing the landscape, PaperCut's Digital Lead Grayson Campbell embarked on a website transformation initiative to consolidate systems into a single convenient content management system. With leadership support and a focus on enabling self-service, Grayson realized the company needed a modern CMS — and ideally one that produced performant static sites. He began evaluating SaaS solutions that could integrate with Hugo and allow non-technical users to publish content themselves.

Finding the right strategic partner

Most CMS platforms Grayson trialed didn't properly accommodate PaperCut's unique infrastructure requirements. Being an established scaling business with complex hosting configurations and ISO security compliance needs, finding the right solution for PaperCut was difficult:

I was looking for a company that understood that or got that and were willing to work on top of what we had — and around what we had.

After assessing several options, Grayson decided to partner with CloudCannon, in part because he didn’t want PaperCut’s code and content to be locked into third-party services like an API-based CMS. Another feature that stood out was the accountability offered by CloudCannon’s Git-based version control, where every change to a website can be easily tracked and attributed to an author, editor, or developer.

Unlocking a wide-ranging digital transformation

By consolidating PaperCut's properties into CloudCannon, Grayson successfully centralized control into a single publishing-friendly CMS. This lifted major friction from the update process, saving IT teams from monotonous workload and empowering users to freely publish changes themselves in real-time. Now PaperCut’s content team can draft, edit, and publish their work whenever they want, and as Grayson notes, the speed to get everything done is “significantly faster than it was before.”

Previously, due to both technical and structural bottlenecks, PaperCut’s time-to-publish for non-technical editors was anywhere up to five weeks — or even more. CloudCannon has cut that down to a matter of minutes, and has also democratized content publishing for the team, supporting PaperCut’s flat corporate structure.

With CloudCannon's intuitive WYSIWYG Content Editor and the Visual Editor for page building, demonstrated in the video above, even non-technical content owners can now operate autonomously. As Grayson explains, "even the most unconfident editors in my team are pretty confident using it now." The new system provides full accountability, too — with Git workflows allowing detailed tracking of who changed what and when.

Beyond the self-service CMS, PaperCut also leverages CloudCannon's professional services for more complex jobs. In just over 18 months, CloudCannon’s Enterprise Success team has worked on over 20 major website projects, from full redesigns and creative campaigns to technical migrations. For example, for PaperCut’s 25th birthday together they "retroed" PaperCut's website to recreate it as it could have been in 1998. Such ambitious and creative undertakings would not have been possible alone.

At this year’s HugoConf, PaperCut’s Rachel Uberti and Sanjay Jayaprakash discussed how the PaperCut and CloudCannon teams work so well together:

From Grayson’s perspective, too, it’s been a good match.

I think that relationship has been the best part of working with CloudCannon. We get so much direct contact with the Enterprise Success team that the projects that we work on together are amazing.

Tangible impacts: speed, security and success

Since consolidating PaperCut's properties into CloudCannon, Grayson estimates the team has already migrated 98% of all web pages, with the remaining 2% underway as business priorities allow. Beyond the sheer efficiency of centralization, he’s delighted that the team has increased website publishing velocity a hundredfold.

Core web vitals metrics on site performance have also improved significantly after moving to a primarily static architecture. By eliminating bloated serverside software, pages now load faster for PaperCut's customers worldwide. The difference in their aggregated performance score is compelling — from an average of 14 before CloudCannon, to an average in the low 90s with CloudCannon.

With CloudCannon unlocking their potential for change, PaperCut's digital team is proceeding full steam ahead on customer-centric growth projects. Now that the technical barriers and infrastructure limitations are finally resolved, the focus has shifted to using their modern stack to reach more users, and spread the word about their software and its benefits.

The journey has fostered a strong partnership between PaperCut and CloudCannon too, bringing international teams closer together to solve complex puzzles.

Looking ahead

By progressively expanding their CMS-led transformation with CloudCannon’s Enterprise Success team, PaperCut has built a future-proof foundation for digital experiences. With its core infrastructure stabilized and flexibility restored, the company can remain responsive to customer needs in the competitive print software industry.

Grayson’s initial vision for PaperCut’s websites — an accessible self-service publishing model, supporting a flat corporate structure — has been achieved by their partnership with CloudCannon.

The string of successes that this partnership has delivered underscores the importance of collaboration between the PaperCut and CloudCannon Enterprise Success teams. With the right mix of product customization and dedicated customer support, CloudCannon helps companies like PaperCut remove as many barriers as possible — barriers to publishing, to collaboration, and ultimately to reaching their users more efficiently, every time.