A local marketing agency approached me on behalf of a regional Ford dealer who also wanted to present the vehicles offered on AutoScout24 on its website. Instead of having to maintain the entries in two separate systems, the client wanted to be able to make all additions and changes exclusively in the comprehensive AutoScout24 system, which had been specially developed for this purpose. The current vehicle selection was to appear automatically on the company website – without any manual maintenance effort.
Development and design
The first work in spring 2021 involved the visual design of the public vehicle overview: a page module that could be integrated into the existing page builder with which the editorial team was already familiar. Instead of having to adopt a predefined and contradictory AutoScout24 design, the module needed to reflect the client’s CI/CD and be seamlessly integrated.
Integrating data via an external API can often lead to performance problems, even though we have full confidence in the quality of the chosen interface for this project. Nevertheless, the data is regularly retrieved from the remote server via a background process and stored in the WordPress database to serve as a data source for the client’s website. This ensures that the website is always up to date without affecting its performance.
As the user interface offers interactive functions for visitors – such as switching between list and detailed views, filter and sorting options or an image carousel of the available photos of the vehicle – I decided to implement the tool using the JavaScript framework “React”. This enabled immediate updates to the view based on the fully pre-loaded data set, so that interaction for visitors was smooth and instantaneous.
Further development
The programmed solution ran smoothly and without technical intervention for four and a half years until AutoScout24 developed a new interface in 2025. This made it necessary to revise the WordPress plugin. Thanks to a robust development process and a modular, component-based strategy in the original implementation, the adjustments to my code for the new authentication process and the changed data structure were implemented in a short time.
