Australia Post cuts developer portal bounce rate from 30% to 1.75% with Redocly — and publishes 21 new APIs in 4 months
Australia's national postal service replaced a 4-year-old AngularJS developer portal with Redocly, achieving a 28-percentage-point drop in developer bounce rate and publishing 21 new APIs within four months of go-live.
Background
Auspost's internally built developer portal, running on AngularJS 1.5, lacked search functionality, OpenAPI 3.0 support, and multi-scheme Try-out capability — making it increasingly difficult for developers to find and test APIs from a growing API catalog. With AngularJS reaching end-of-life, Auspost needed to replace the portal.
What Was Implemented
- Deployed Redocly Developer Portal on-premise (replacing AngularJS 1.5 internal portal), October 2020
- Implemented full-documentation search across the entire API catalog
- Enabled OpenAPI 2.0 and 3.0 support with plans to extend to OAS 3.1
- Added multi-scheme Try-out functionality: Basic Auth, API Key, OAuth2, and OpenID Connect
- Used role-based access control (RBAC) with multiple identity providers for different developer tiers (internal, partner, public)
- Ongoing collaboration with Redocly team for portal improvements (release logs, improved docs, CMS capability)
Results
Developer portal bounce rate dropped from 30% to 1.75% following the Redocly deployment. Auspost published 21 new APIs in less than four months after go-live. The portal attracted 36 new registered developers in the first month . Developers can now search the full API catalog and try out requests using any of the supported authentication schemes.
Lessons
- Developer portal bounce rate is a meaningful proxy for documentation quality: a rate of 30% signals developers cannot find what they need; a rate near 1.75% signals they can
- Multi-scheme Try-out is a non-negotiable for platforms serving diverse API consumers with different authentication requirements
- On-premise deployment can match cloud deployment in functionality while satisfying security, compliance, and control requirements for regulated or security-sensitive organizations
- Switching from a custom-built portal to a purpose-built platform removes maintenance overhead and enables faster iteration on developer experience