Spring EQ on Umbraco Cloud

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.

Replace this block with a Project Image block. Subject: the pre-engagement site and the new brand side by side, same viewport, same page. Source: Wayback Machine capture of the previous springeq.com on the left, live capture on the right, each labelled with its year. Caption: "The Spring EQ brand redesign, shown before and after."

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.

[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER 1.7: THE UMBRACO BACKOFFICE] Replace this block with a Project Image block. Subject: the Umbraco backoffice with a Spring EQ page open in the block grid editor and the widget picker expanded, with the named blocks legible. Source: screen capture from the Staging environment rather than Live, using realistic content, with anything client confidential obscured or replaced. Caption: "A campaign page under construction in the block grid editor." Note: this is the most significant image in the case study for the Umbraco.com submission. Capture at high resolution and crop closely to the editor canvas. See also placeholders 1.5 (widget library, Figma), 1.6 (grid layout options, layout-options-umbraco-grid.psd in Scandia Marketing root), 1.9 (structured content two-panel) and 1.10 (Cloud environments), which can be added as further Project Image blocks.

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.

[INTERNAL NOTE, DELETE BEFORE PUBLISHING] All figures on this page are illustrative placeholders carried over from the case study draft, included so the page reads as finished during review. Replace each with a verified figure from GA4, Search Console, HubSpot or PageSpeed before this node is published. Figures used: 94 percent reduction, three to five days to under two hours, 43 pages in 60 days, full component reuse, 312 pages carrying structured data, 61 percent growth in rich result impressions, 34 percent growth in organic sessions, 19 percent reduction in bounce rate, 96 percent Core Web Vitals pass rate up from 41 percent, LCP 3.8s to 1.6s, 22 percent increase in form conversion, zero lost submissions. Also confirm the Umbraco CMS major version with Alexey before stating one publicly, and confirm Spring EQ approval for being named.