Umbraco-Based Corporate Website Optimized for 6x Faster Page Loading

In addition to its Sitecore-powered platform for searching and renting office spaces online, The Instant Group runs a corporate news portal built on Umbraco, an open-source CMS based on ASP.NET Core.

The Instant Group wasn’t satisfied with how their news portal was performing. Pages took 5.5 seconds to load, while mobile users encountered functional bugs despite the website’s responsive design. Cross-browser compatibility problems also contributed to high bounce rates, and the absence of multilingual support was a significant shortcoming.

As SaM Solutions’ team had already demonstrated high competence in another project — the modernization and maintenance of The Instant Group’s Real-Estate Marketplace, the Customer decided to entrust their Umbraco-powered corporate news portal to us. The project team included back-end and front-end developers as well as a QA engineer, working according to Agile practices with frequent releases.

Refactoring and migration to React

The project began with a detailed assessment of the portal’s codebase and architecture. The analysis revealed a complex implementation built on outdated, underperforming technologies, so the team decided to carry out a comprehensive refactoring of the solution.

After enhancing the back end, SaM Solutions’ experts modernized the user interface by replacing legacy jQuery with React. The core business logic was preserved. To further improve performance, our specialists implemented server-side rendering using React, Webpack, and TypeScript.

UI optimization

The Instant Group also requested a complete redesign of the website, so a UI/UX designer joined the project team. The process included an audit of the portal’s content structure and user interface, followed by the creation and implementation of a new design concept.

During the audit, our specialists revealed that oversized, unoptimized images were placing a heavy load on the website and significantly reducing page loading speed. To resolve the issue, SaM Solutions’ team automated the conversion of all existing images to the more compact WebP format and developed a custom Umbraco plugin for uploading and optimizing new images.

Migration to Umbraco 8 and multilingual support

Initially, The Instant Group’s corporate website had US and UK English versions with two near-identical content trees. The Customer voiced the intention to introduce more language versions, but with Umbraco 7 at the core of the website, the support for multiple languages was limited. To solve this issue, SaM Solutions’ team migrated the website to Umbraco 8 — the version that does support different languages. This upgrade involved content migration, structural optimizations to the content tree, updates to the code logic, and implementation of essential redirects.

Continuous development

As part of the constant growth of their website, The Instant Group regularly requested the development and deployment of new functionalities. Over the years of cooperation, our experts completed:

• The development of new page templates and page components.
• The deployment of a new search mechanism on the website.
• The integration with the Salesforce system.
• The development of a marketing analytics module for all types of forms.

As a result of the collaboration with SaM Solutions, The Instant Group received a faster, more scalable, and user-friendly corporate website. The upgraded solution now:

• Loads in just 0.9 seconds instead of 5.5 seconds, delivering a sixfold performance improvement.
• Runs on Umbraco 8, providing a more modern and flexible technical foundation.
• Offers a consistent experience across browsers and mobile devices.
• Features a redesigned interface that encourages longer visitor sessions.
• Supports four additional language versions for international audiences.
• Integrates with Salesforce to streamline data exchange and business processes.
• Includes new functionality that supports the website’s continued growth.