With Sam Harnack, Technical Marketing Director
Twitch is the world’s leading online streaming platform, where millions of people gather live every day to chat, interact, and make their own entertainment together. What started as a streaming platform focused on video games has now expanded to include content of nearly any type, from cooking, music, and art to simply chatting.
Twitch supports their growing community of 17.5 million daily active users and 2.2 million content creators by building informational marketing sites. These microsites cover a range of audiences and use cases, including:
With Twitch’s previous setup - without preview or staging environments - live sites were frequently breaking, causing considerable anxiety for the team entering content. As a result, meeting the high demand for content and branding on marketing sites was severely hindered. Twitch therefore set out to find a CMS that fit their needs.
Marketing wanted a CMS requiring minimal technical knowledge and developer reliance, with multilingual translation for its growing global base. The development team wanted a system they could use to quickly build new sites, reduce support requests from marketing, and ensure sites stay online and high-performing under heavy traffic. As Twitch is owned by Amazon, they also needed to host the sites on their own AWS infrastructure.
Twitch decided to use the static site generator Jekyll to build out their marketing sites. This gave them a lightweight system that developers use to spin up new sites and then deploy to their own AWS stack. The sites are static, making them extremely fast, secure, and easily scalable to Twitch’s global audience.
Having solved their developer requirements, Twitch looked for a CMS that could integrate with Jekyll for the marketing team. They tested many headless CMSs, but the editors found them difficult to use and that the content was disconnected from the live site. When they tried CloudCannon, it was a perfect match: the editors could update content directly inline and publish without any communication with a developer.
With CloudCannon, Twitch has an automated internationalization workflow to translate sites into 27 languages. The marketing team writes content in English, which is then exported to human translators on Smartling and then ingested back into the site to create a copy of the site in each language. With this workflow the marketing team can add new content and pages without having to worry about translation.
With over 15 cutting-edge marketing sites on CloudCannon, Twitch continues to push the pace on providing timely content to their audience.
