Spring EQ on Umbraco Cloud

Spring EQ engaged Scandia to redesign its brand and rebuild its website without suspending marketing operations for the duration of a CMS replatform. A single design investment was implemented on two platforms in sequence, delivering first on HubSpot and then on Umbraco Cloud.

A single design investment, delivered on two platforms


One Design Investment, Two Platforms

Three months from kickoff to a new brand live on HubSpot, then a full rebuild on Umbraco Cloud with no component redrawn.

A Widget Library Built for Spring EQ

Nine page types composed from a purpose-built block library on Scandia's Umbraco grid. Campaign pages became an editorial task rather than a development request.

Structured Content Search Engines Can Read

FAQs, reviews and article metadata modelled as real fields rather than free text, emitted as schema.org markup automatically across every qualifying page.

Industry

Finance / Home Equity Lending

Services

Brand and Design, Digital Strategy, UX / UI and Design Systems, HubSpot CMS Development, Umbraco Implementation, Umbraco Cloud Hosting, Systems Integration, Structured Data and Technical SEO, Training and Knowledge Transfer

Platform

Umbraco CMS on Umbraco Cloud. Previously HubSpot CMS.

Springeq Card Blue 2600X1700

Results & Metrics

Spring EQ launched a new brand and a rebuilt platform without taking its marketing operation offline. The result is a site that is faster to publish on, faster to load, and structured so that search engines can read it.

94

faster campaign page publishing, from a development cycle of three to five days to under two hours of editorial time

34

growth in organic sessions quarter on quarter following the Umbraco launch, with bounce rate down 19 percent

312

pages publishing valid schema.org structured data across FAQ, review and article types, against none on the previous platform

96

of pages passing Core Web Vitals, up from 41 percent, with Largest Contentful Paint improved from 3.8 to 1.6 seconds

The Challenge

Home equity lending is a crowded, rate-driven and heavily regulated market in which competing lenders present broadly similar propositions through broadly similar digital experiences. Spring EQ needed a brand and a digital platform that stood apart, and it needed both without pausing its marketing operation for the length of a CMS replatform.

The marketing team worked inside HubSpot, where its campaigns, lead workflows and reporting already lived. A conventional replatform would have taken that away for the better part of a year. At the same time, HubSpot carried a defined ceiling, recorded in the original proposal as long-term limitations in terms of performance, scalability and customization.

Scandia therefore designed the work so that a single design investment could be implemented twice: first on HubSpot, so the team could begin working immediately, and then on Umbraco Cloud, where the platform could support what the business needed next.

The Rebuild

A static marketing site became a platform its own team could run

Before Legacy static build
mortgage.springeq.com
Before: Legacy static build
  1. Every content change went through a developer release.
  2. Rates were maintained by hand, directly in page markup.
  3. Partners had no way to embed the equity tools.
After Rebuilt on Umbraco
springeq.com
After: Rebuilt on Umbraco
  1. Marketing edits any page block without a release.
  2. Rates and estimates come live from the pricing service.
  3. The estimator ships to partner sites as one snippet.

Same brand, same audience, a different operating model. The legacy site was a static build with hand maintained rate content; the rebuild runs on Umbraco, draws rates from the live pricing service, and distributes its equity tools to partner sites.

The Approach

Concept and UI. The engagement opened with stakeholder interviews, a review of existing brand material, and a restructure of the sitemap and top-level navigation. Scandia produced annotated wireframes and interactive prototypes for the core page types, followed by two distinct design directions for Spring EQ to evaluate. The selected direction was developed into a full responsive design system in Figma across desktop, tablet and mobile, planned and built to WCAG 2.2 AA.

A component inventory. Scandia designed a catalogue of components rather than a set of finished pages. Nine page types were composed from a named widget library covering hero variants, a product comparison grid, rate callouts and rates tables, customer tools and features, testimonials, awards and accreditations, FAQ blocks, related products, related news sliders, on-page and sticky progressive forms, contact and two-column callouts, and partner site links. The lead generation landing page was specified from the outset as an aggregation of widgets from other pages, and blog body content on the same basis. Phase two consequently constituted a rebuild of the platform rather than a rebuild of the design.

The grid and the widget library. Scandia's Umbraco implementations are built on a block-based grid rather than on fixed page templates. Every component in the Figma design system was implemented as an Umbraco block with its own editing schema, and editors place those blocks into grid rows configured as one column, two columns (even, weighted left, or weighted right), or three columns. Because the library was developed for Spring EQ's content rather than adapted from a generic starter kit, each block is modelled on the business domain it serves. The rate callout is structured around a featured rate. The product comparison grid is structured around the fields a HELOC row requires. The hero with sticky form passes its initial values into the full application flow. Shared content allows a block to be authored once and referenced wherever it appears, so that a disclosure or promotional message does not require updating in every location it occupies. Spring EQ's marketing team therefore composes pages directly, and producing a new lead generation landing page for a campaign is an editorial task rather than a development request.

Umbraco Forms, integrated with HubSpot. Changing the CMS did not require changing the CRM. Scandia implemented Umbraco Forms as the capture layer on the Umbraco site and integrated it with HubSpot, so that every submission continues to reach the workflows, lists, attribution and reporting on which the marketing and sales teams already depend. Custom form handling was developed on top of the standard product to support Spring EQ's multi-step progressive capture pattern, in which a sticky hero form initiates the interaction and hands off to the full flow. Tracking, UTM and attribution data is carried through and written back with the lead.

Structured content. Rather than leaving FAQs, reviews and article details as free-form rich text, Scandia modelled them as structured fields within Umbraco. An FAQ is stored as a question and an answer, a review as a rating and an author, and an article carries its own metadata, categories and tags. Because the content is structured at source, the site emits correct schema.org markup automatically. FAQ blocks, review and rating data and article metadata are published in a form that search engines can parse directly. Editors benefit from a simpler authoring experience, and the search engine optimisation benefit is applied consistently across every qualifying page without editorial intervention.

Hosting on Umbraco Cloud under the Gold Partner agreement. Scandia has held Umbraco Gold Partner status for 15 years and hosts Spring EQ's project under its Gold Partner umbrella account. Spring EQ remains the Organization Owner of the project, and all content, data and intellectual property remain entirely Spring EQ's. Scandia acts as billing contact, platform administrator and single technical point of contact, with a direct escalation channel into Umbraco HQ. Umbraco Forms and Deploy are included under that agreement without premium upcharge. Additional environments, including QA, UAT and feature branches, may be launched at no additional Umbraco Cloud cost, so Spring EQ can stand up an environment for a compliance review cycle, or to test a campaign in parallel with long-running development work, without incurring a platform charge. The platform is monitored continuously through UptimeRobot alerting and PagerDuty phone escalation, against a defined severity matrix carrying a one-hour response target for high severity incidents.

Go-live. Content pages were created and populated in Umbraco, media was migrated out of HubSpot, the team was trained on the widget library, and DNS was cut over from HubSpot to Umbraco Cloud in August 2026, followed by a hypercare period.

Spring EQ Umbraco Backoffice screenshot showing the editing of a product page

The Results

Platform migration completed. www.springeq.com now runs on Umbraco, with the Equity Estimator on the same platform, consolidating the marketing site and the company's principal conversion tool onto a single stack.

Campaign page production. Publishing a new campaign or product landing page moved from a development cycle of three to five days to under two hours of editorial time. In the first 60 days following launch, Spring EQ's marketing team built and published 43 pages without raising a development request.

Design reuse across platforms. The entire phase one component library carried into the Umbraco build. No components required redesign, and the Figma design system remains the single source of truth for both implementations.

Continuity of marketing operations. Spring EQ's team worked within a new site on a familiar platform throughout the interval between the HubSpot launch and the Umbraco cutover, rather than waiting out a migration.

Lead capture continuity. Umbraco Forms feeds HubSpot, so CRM workflows, attribution and reporting continued without interruption across the cutover. No submissions were lost during the DNS window, and form conversion rose 22 percent after launch.

Environment flexibility. Additional environments for regulatory review and campaign testing carry no incremental platform cost under the Gold Partner hosting arrangement.

Planning a replatform without pausing your marketing?

Scandia has been an Umbraco Gold Partner for 15 years, and works with regulated financial institutions on brand, platform and integration. Talk to us about phasing a rebuild so your team keeps working throughout.