Wilbur-Ellis

The Challenge

Wilbur-Ellis came online as a single corporate overview. Over two decades it accumulated everything a $3 billion company needs to publish without ever being rearchitected to carry it: recruiting, product lines, services, specialty programs, division-level marketing. By 2017 the footprint spanned four business unit web properties, multiple brand sites, and thirty-nine departmental SharePoint sites. Divisional teams sat outside any single reporting line, so standards could be recommended but never mandated.

The Insight

Lack of standardization, platform proliferation, and duplication of efforts was increasing complexity and ambiguity for operating and maintaining digital properties. A redesign would have reset the appearance and left the challenges unresolved: every campaign a custom build, every page dependent on a specialist, every property drifting on its own performance and security curve. The durable fix was architectural and operational. The ecosystem needed reusable structure that was usable by non-technical teams, and a measurement cadence that put site health in front of leadership every month instead of after something broke.

The Solution

Platform architecture. Consolidated onto Pantheon-hosted WordPress behind a Fastly CDN, with reusable block-editing templates and content models so marketing, HR, and divisional teams could publish without a developer in the loop. Schema markup and internal-linking standards made the estate discoverable as one catalog rather than six islands.

Site health as a managed metric. Monthly DevOps reporting across page speed, security headers, hosting capacity, and CDN caching for every property. Reporting included sites outside direct control, where the report itself became the mechanism for driving change without authority.

Governance and compliance by default. WCAG, GDPR, and CCPA requirements written into the templates and the SharePoint governance model so compliance held by default rather than by audit. Intake, prioritization, and sprint delivery ran as a single program across marketing, HR, and executive stakeholders instead of as a request queue.

The Result

Implementation of the soltuions initially resulting in:

• Increase in site traffic by 184%
• Increase in pageviews by 256%
• Increase in average session duration by 53%
• Desktop PageSpeed 91–99 sustained across all directly managed properties
• Decrease in bounce rate by 71% as compared to the previous reporting period

Leveraging these solutions for specific campaigns, the 100th Anniversary generated the following year-over-year results on the Corporate site:

• Increase in sessions by 35%, 371,114 → 501,137

• Increase in new users by 38%, 239,700 → 331,291
• Increase in pageviews by 31%, 851,978 → 1,113,084