Home ownership is a common dream, but mortgages are notoriously confusing. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just call an expert for free advice? Since 1999, L&C Mortgages have done just that, and are now the largest fee-free broker in the United Kingdom, empowering individuals on their journey to homeownership with expert, unbiased advice.
L&C’s website is meticulously optimized for both user engagement and conversion, and a significant portion of traffic is driven by strategic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, ensuring a steady stream of potential clients. “Our website is the heartbeat of our business, handling millions of visits a year,” says Marketing Director Annette Read. “It’s critical to every distribution channel we use and the hub of our marketing activity.”
But their custom-coded website presented a significant barrier to the marketing team’s digital strategy. Website updates often took weeks or months to implement, and were reliant on development resources. These inefficiencies curbed creativity and timely market responses, and were stifling L&C’s ability to effectively scale.
“Our website had become dated,” says Annette. Since she joined the company in 2015, Annette had been advocating for a more flexible content management system (CMS) to accelerate digital initiatives. “We needed to modernize our web presence to meet consumer expectations.”
Delivering a robust site migration in 4 months with Webflow partner, MakeBuild
Our marketing team is proud to have completed such a large migration without losing SEO rankings. That really comes down to the collaboration between MakeBuild, our SEO agency, and our Webflow Enterprise Account Team who guided us with expertise and best practices along the way.
- Annette Read, Marketing Director, L&C Mortgages
L&C’s legacy website was marked by inefficiencies and delays, and even minor updates required extensive IT involvement. “Engineer resources were being wasted on making changes to copy or element colors,” says Adam Jones, L&C’s Head of Digital Marketing. “They needed to focus on delivering higher-priority development work.”
The resulting protracted timelines limited the marketing team’s ability to capitalize on opportunities or respond to market dynamics effectively. To reduce dependency on engineering resources, speed up deployment times, and improve their ability to execute marketing strategies, L&C explored numerous platforms. They ultimately chose Webflow Enterprise, recognizing that a visual-first composable CMS best fit the team’s needs. “From the moment I saw the Webflow demo, I was sold,” says Annette.
To ensure L&C executed the site migration without a hitch, it was driven by a partnership with Webflow Partner and MakeBuild, who worked seamlessly with their marketing team and SEO agency. Their strategy included keeping the website’s core architecture intact to safeguard L&C’s hard-earned SEO rankings and authority in search results. Additionally, rebranding efforts were designed to enhance the user experience without negatively impacting conversion metrics. The collaboration included rigorous testing and validation of SEO strategies, which were ratified by L&C’s SEO agency before implementation.
“Thanks to MakeBuild, the transition was so smooth,” says Annette. “Navigation, user experience, SEO, and conversion were all preserved. Our metrics even slightly improved post-migration, and our SEO agency continues to tell us that our Webflow site is faster than the old one.” The team also saw a 7% increase in conversion rate with their new site.
L&C’s dedicated Webflow Enterprise account team also played a vital role. “Webflow’s Technical Architect was invaluable, providing a website audit and recommendations to boost our site speed and functionality, and ensuring we met all our SEO needs,” says Adam. Their Technical Architect’s involvement ensured that the transition to Webflow was not just a change in platform but an upgrade in functionality and efficiency.
The synergy between L&C, MakeBuild, and Webflow has laid a robust foundation for future enhancements and growth initiatives. “The collaboration has just grown and strengthened across the site,” says Annette. “We’re grasping the capability that Webflow has given us with both hands, and we’re running with it.”
Removing bottlenecks and sparking creativity with Webflow
Webflow transformed how we operate. Collaboration is now seamless and dynamic workflows empower us to innovate at a faster pace.
- Adam Jones, Head of Digital Marketing, L&C Mortgages
Significantly enhancing L&C’s speed to market, Webflow’s collaboration features have revolutionized how the team works together. With page branching, multiple team members can now work simultaneously on different aspects of the website, while publishing workflows provide more visibility and tighter control over when changes go live to their production website. “Since we’re regulated, we need to make sure things are signed off on before they go live, so we use publishing workflows to their maximum potential,” says Adam.
Roles and permissions ensure that the right people have access to complete the right actions on the website, reducing risk and ensuring relevant guardrails are in place. Updates that previously took 2 months can now be completed in 2-4 hours or less. Webflow’s tools enable parallel work across digital projects without bottlenecks, fostering team creativity and helping them deliver professional, dynamic website experiences.
Harnessing Webflow’s CMS for seamless back-end integration
Driving website traffic isn’t enough anymore. We need to provide enhanced user experiences that convert, so being able to implement a real time test and learn strategy with Webflow has been critical.
- Annette Read, Marketing Director, L&C Mortgages
Webflow offers the flexibility needed to optimize the website, conduct A/B tests, and empower an experimentation mindset. “We’ve already run more tests on the main pages of the website in the last couple of months than we did in the final year of the actual website being live,” says Adam.
To maintain the dynamic functionality of their website, L&C is harnessing the power of Webflow’s CMS extensibility to seamlessly integrate with various back-end systems. By leveraging APIs, they can provide real-time data updates, allowing users to compare mortgage rates from over 90 lenders, giving their customers access to the most current information. The ability to call multiple back-end APIs allows L&C to incorporate complex features like bespoke comparison tables and their mortgage calculator.
As they look to the future, the team plans to leverage Webflow’s CMS to develop specialized resource-rich hubs within their core business, such as the buy-to-let mortgage market. This not only differentiates L&C from competitors but aligns with their broader strategy of leveraging digital innovation to cater to diverse customer needs.
By scaling their digital presence with Webflow, L&C will continue to capture new opportunities and maintain their position as market leader. “With Webflow, we’re presenting a polished brand and making all the right changes at the right time to match the needs of the business and our consumer,” says Annette. “It’s liberating.”
.svg)
.svg)
