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An enhanced website experience for an organisation supporting safe, efficient and compliant navigation
The UK Hydropgraphic Office (UKHO) was at a crossroads. Their website was running on Drupal 7 and the whole infrastructure needed a serious upgrade. Sticking with the outdated content management system (CMS) was not going to allow them to showcase their range of market-leading services effectively.
And it was going to put them at increased risk of security breaches and impaired site functionality when the long-anticipated end of life was reached.
An audit of their existing website was telling – workflows were inefficient, content management was fragmented, and the user experience didn’t reflect the premium service UKHO is known for. They were also facing multiple issues with site scalability and caching.
The fastest route to achieving their objectives was clear: migration to a new system that would offer a best-in-class experience to their audience.
And with their sights set on moving to a Digital Experience Platform provided by Acquia, a complete overhaul was needed.
Already familiar with Drupal, UKHO sought our expertise for migration. We immediately saw an opportunity not just to migrate their platform but to extend their entire website’s capabilities.
Understanding the magnitude of this transformation, the task at hand was to implement a system that could not only support the creation of multiple web pages, but deliver high standards of SEO, enhanced performance and restore vital security support.
We knew that a Drupal upgrade, with its brand new suite of features, would deliver a better experience and functionality for both users and the team at UKHO.
Managing high volumes of content without losing SEO
How could we move a large amount of content to a format that would allow the marketing team as much flexibility as possible?
On the surface, it might seem simple: upload this copy here, drag this image there and, bravo, your website is updated. But it’s not that straightforward. We were dealing with thousands of articles and blog posts that already had strong SEO rankings. The real challenge was to develop a migration path that wouldn’t negatively affect these rankings.
Navigating visible and hidden content
When moving from one website format to another, we had to ensure that both visible and hidden content was handled carefully. Visible content is what appears on the surface of a page, while hidden content is all that sits behind it, for example image alt tags, UTM tags and meta tags. We had to plan out and implement a process that took every element into account.
Capturing every detail
As there was a large quantity of existing content being moved from UKHO’s previous site, we needed to map out each asset in detail before capturing all the information and transfering it to the new system.
The URL strategy crucial to SEO
With a brand new website in the works and everything running smoothly, you might assume the UKHO website was about set to go live, right? Not quite!
Successful website migrations hinge on nailing the URL strategy. This means informing search engines that URL 1 has changed to URL 2 and ensuring that all redirects are properly implemented.
For the UKHO site, getting this right was crucial to preserving SEO rankings during the transition.
Implementing atomic web design
Using the atomic design approach, we broke the website down into manageable and reusable components. These components were then built into Acquia’s Site Studio. This allowed us to create flexible templates for the high volume of content in the UKHO archive.
Knowledge sharing and performance optimisation
Proctors team members assisted the UKHO internal team by sharing relevant knowledge on optimising performance in Drupal.
We worked closely with their marketing department, offering expertise on how they could build and customise top-level pages independently, without needing in-house developers.
Their job was to focus on creating these pages. Ours was to handle the import of existing content and improve its performance speed by avoiding migration deadlocks.
And freedom was theirs. With an expert migration from Drupal 7, UKHO then had a secure and centralised platform to manage all their content independently.
The result? A virtual self-serve system that puts UKHO’s marketing capabilities directly in their own hands, streamlining their efforts with minimal hassle.
Following the upgrade to the newest Drupal release, website visits increased by 8%, setting a new pace for the UK Hydrographic Office.
