Suffolk Building Society

Our strategy comprised of an end-to-end migration from Joomla to WordPress utilising a multisite set-up allowing single shared CMS, code-base, theme and plugin stack. Both websites would have only minor cosmetic differences, equally adopting the new brand.

Our new UX-led design transformed the site’s navigation and brought new product filters, calculators and features to guide customers to the right mortgage and savings products faster. We pitched bold KPIs to win the project including increasing average time on page by 30% and maintaining/recovering all organic traffic levels after launch – a top Board concern.

Implementation & outputs:
01. Provided simple, yet highly effective mortgage and savings calculation variables within the new CMS
02. Ensured the consistency of product content across both sites
03. User tested the new site to ensure success
04. Implemented updates after launch to improve UX.

Taking the brand from print to digital enabled StrategiQ’s development team to introduce subtle animations to the design’s components. Collaborating with our design team to animate their new ‘tile’ icons. By launching the new website onto the new (and used) domain names, our strategy was to hide the new site from Google, allowing an initial ‘soft launch’ to a member group who could critique ahead of the full launch. During the 2 week soft launch, the working group, members of the public, and a contingent of deliberate paid search users provided valuable insights. Post soft-launch, feedback highlighted that existing customers wanted to speak to somebody, whilst new customers were not scrolling.

Page speed was committed as a key deliverable to further aid user experience. Our development team has taken pride in maintaining strong performance with Google’s Core Web vitals in collaboration with our hosting recommendation and partners at WPEngine. Performance also manifests with GTmetrix, we achieved and have maintained an A grade against the website since launch. Through 301 redirect mapping and ID of top performing keywords, our developers executed a meticulous SEO migration.

Suffolk Building Society have significantly reduced ongoing maintenance fees by being able to fully update the website in-house via the intuitive new Gutenberg CMS.