Sitecore Frontend: from tens of leads a day to ~1,000 a day

Situation

An enterprise CMS, a marketing team that never stops, and a frontend in the middle

The client is a leading home improvement company in the UK. Their website runs on Sitecore — an enterprise content management system chosen by large organisations for governance and scale, not for how quickly a marketer can put a page live.

That gap is the whole problem. The client runs continuous marketing campaigns. Every campaign wants its own landing page, its own form, its own tracking, and it wants them this week rather than next quarter. Enterprise CMS platforms are not, by temperament, in a hurry.

We were brought in on an ongoing retainership to manage the full frontend: everything the visitor actually sees and interacts with, delivered at campaign speed inside an enterprise platform's constraints.

Problem

Three things were capping what the traffic could produce

1. Campaign pages could not be produced fast enough. A campaign with no dedicated landing page sends paid traffic to a general page, and a general page converts like a general page.
2. Lead forms were built to collect, not to convert. A form is the last three inches of a marketing budget. Field count, ordering, validation behaviour and error handling all move the completion rate, and none of them were being treated as conversion decisions.
3. Every visitor was being served from origin. On a high-traffic site that is both a speed problem and a resilience problem — the busier a campaign gets, the slower the page becomes at exactly the moment it matters most.

Traffic was never the constraint. What happened to the traffic after it arrived was the constraint.

Implication

What that costs on a site of this size

At this scale, conversion rate is not a percentage on a report — it is a multiplier on everything the marketing department spends. A campaign landing page that converts a fraction better does not add a few leads; it adds a proportion of every visitor that campaign will ever send, for as long as the page is live.

The same is true in reverse for speed. Every additional second before a form is usable is paid for at the campaign's cost per click, and it is paid silently — nobody fills in a bounce report explaining that the page was slow.

What we did

Five workstreams, run continuously rather than as a project

• Regular landing page creation for marketing campaigns, so no campaign launches without a page built for it
• Lead generation forms created, updated and CRO-optimised — treated as conversion assets, not as data collection
• Schema markup applied across all key pages, so search engines and answer engines can read what each page is about
• Cloudflare CDN integrated — 97% of traffic is now served from the edge rather than from origin
• Regular VWO split tests to find better-converting variants, run as a standing programme rather than a one-off exercise

Result

From tens of leads a day to around a thousand

Over the course of the engagement the site has progressed from generating tens of leads a day to approximately 1,000 leads a day. 97% of traffic is served through the CDN. Split testing continues, so the current numbers are a checkpoint rather than a conclusion.

And then

A thousand leads a day becomes its own problem

A site producing ~1,000 leads a day needs somewhere for those leads to go, someone to follow them up, and a way of telling which campaign produced the ones that turned into money. That became the second engagement with the same client.

Read the CRM and lead management case study →

Tech stack: Sitecore CMS · Cloudflare CDN · VWO · JavaScript · CSS