The Münchener Verein Versicherungsgruppe and its subsidiaries offer a wide range of products. The Group generates over €680 million in premium income annually and is responsible for more than 5.8 billion Euro in investments. Together, the companies offer a high-performance range of products for private and commercial customers as specialists in provision and care.
In the course of a planned TYPO3 LTS update, the technical foundation of the Munich Insurance Group's website was rethought. Besides tangible improvements, the new website pursues the long-term goal of being able to install future updates as economically as possible.
Together with in2code GmbH, the responsible persons from the marketing and IT departments developed a concept how pages and page contents can be provided on a modern basis on several new servers in the future. A complex migration enabled the deconstruction of the old environment to a necessary minimum of TYPO3 extensions. This proximity to the TYPO3 core functionalities simplifies future updates, increases performance and makes the website even more secure without cutting back on the range of functions.
Originally historically grown, generically used TYPO3 extensions for the presentation of products, tables and partner agencies were redesigned and modernized. A multitude of unnecessary and outdated extensions were removed or replaced.
In parallel, outdated HTML markups had to make way for modern HTML5. The number of integrated JavaScript and CSS files was massively reduced. Google Page Speed confirmed this improvement with an increase of almost 140% in the analysis. Integrated assets (images, videos, etc...) were also optimized to improve loading times.
An automated migration ensures that pages, page contents, FAQ elements, products, documents and redirections are displayed in the new system. The intensive use of nesting of page content, which was not possible in the past due to a lack of editorial possibilities, has also been reduced to a necessary minimum in order to further simplify work in the TYPO3 Backend.
A major focus of the refactoring was the easy handling of TYPO3 in the backend. Even less experienced editors will be able to create page content without much effort in the future. The massive use of structured data was also reduced so that page content can be created where it is needed. Product pages can now be created as desired with individual tables.
Addresses of partner agencies, press releases, persons and above all products will be displayed more legibly for search engines in the future. Google thus already shows hits in the search for partner agencies as a preview in the search results list and automatically integrates contacts into other services (such as Google Maps). An analysis of the website before and after the conversion certifies a significant improvement in the findability of the insurer's products on Google.
Advice on the creation and configuration of web server infrastructure is also one of in2code GmbH's areas of responsibility. Together with the group's IT department, we developed a robust setup for future software development with a focus on maximum reliability.
After the upgrade
By the way: The use of our TYPO3 Content Publisher enables the distribution of the content management system on two different servers. Here the editorial system in the intranet serves as a basis for the revision of content by a large number of editors. The productive system without editorial access - but accessible from outside for normal website visitors - is located in the DMZ. This additional barrier not only enables a clean content workflow, but also further hardens the publicly accessible production system against possible attacks.
