Umbraco Modernization Drives 55% Traffic Growth and Faster Publishing

Burford Capital, a global leader in legal finance and asset management, serves a diverse client base from offices across the United States, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. As a publicly traded company on both the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange, Burford’s online presence is a critical touchpoint for investors, clients, and media. However, by the time they approached Emergent Software, their existing website, initially built by a third party on the Umbraco platform, was no longer meeting their needs.

With more than 2,200 pages, the site had grown unwieldy. Its outdated tagging structure created confusion for both internal authors and external users. Region-specific content was duplicated across multiple pages, making content management time-consuming and error-prone. Search engine indexing suffered, undermining the site’s organic visibility. Authors faced friction in the editing experience, and the user interface no longer aligned with the company’s evolving brand standards.

Adding to the challenge, Burford needed a centralized and consistent integration with Marketo, their marketing automation platform, to support gated content and email lead capture. All of this needed to be delivered against a fast-moving timeline. Burford needed a strategic transformation of how their digital presence functioned globally, internally, and at scale.

Emergent Software partnered with Burford Capital to lead a full-site redesign, CMS upgrade, and content migration, focused on performance, usability, and long-term maintainability. The engagement required close collaboration between our developers, QA team, and Burford’s internal stakeholders and design agency to ensure the new platform would meet both editorial and audience-facing needs.

We began by implementing a new front-end design using Umbraco’s block component architecture. This flexible framework gave Burford authors access to a reusable library of branded page components, allowing them to build custom layouts quickly and consistently. Each component was optimized for accessibility and responsive design, ensuring an intuitive experience across devices. A live preview feature was added to the CMS, enabling authors to see real-time renderings of their content before publishing, dramatically improving author confidence and efficiency.

To address the challenge of region-specific content, we developed a custom localization strategy. This included fallback logic that defaulted to English for common elements like headers and footers when region-specific content wasn’t available. Content could automatically adjust based on the user’s location, ensuring visitors were shown relevant blog posts, attorney bios, and articles tied to their geography. We also implemented a unique map-based UI for staff directories, improving usability and creating a more engaging way to explore Burford’s global team.

The backend of the platform was further enhanced with a robust Marketo integration. We built a custom interface within Umbraco that allowed Burford to manage email capture forms and gated PDFs directly from the CMS. Authors could tag which content should be gated, with Marketo forms applied dynamically across resources, articles, and insights, ensuring consistency without developer involvement.

Behind the scenes, we addressed one of the largest hurdles: migrating and cleaning up more than 2,200 pages of legacy content. Using a series of custom scripts, we automated much of the migration process while rearchitecting the site’s tagging system to reduce redundancy and improve content discoverability. Our QA team manually reviewed every page, link, and form to ensure a smooth transition. Image libraries were reorganized and optimized for web delivery. Cloudflare was introduced as a content delivery network (CDN), improving global load times and overall performance.

From the first planning session through post-launch support, the project emphasized speed, stability, and scalability. Weekly sprint reviews, milestone demos, and collaborative QA/UAT checkpoints ensured progress stayed on track and the site was delivered on schedule.

The new BurfordCapital.com launched successfully, transforming both the user and editor experience. The redesigned UI and modern CMS infrastructure elevated the company’s digital brand, while the modular content tools made internal workflows dramatically more efficient. With the ability to preview, gate, and localize content all within Umbraco, Burford’s authors are empowered to publish high-quality content faster and more confidently.

The SEO improvements were immediate and measurable. The cleaner tagging structure and improved site architecture helped drive a 55% increase in total traffic and a 70% rise in non-paid traffic. Gated content interactions rose by 10% year-over-year.

Visitors now enjoy a faster, more tailored experience. Pages load more quickly thanks to Cloudflare, and content is personalized based on region without adding editorial overhead.

Internally, the modernization delivered a major workflow upgrade. Burford’s authors no longer struggle with fragmented tools or unclear templates. Instead, they publish through a component-based system built for consistency and speed — including real-time preview and a structured library of reusable blocks that keep brand standards intact while enabling flexible page layouts.

That editor experience has been recognized at the highest level within the Umbraco ecosystem. Emergent Software has now won Umbraco’s “Best Editing Experience” award twice in recent years, including the 2024 global award for the Burford Capital website rebuild, announced at Codegarden, Umbraco’s flagship international conference. With close to 100 submissions from agencies worldwide, the award reflects a true best-in-class distinction.

Umbraco’s jury praised Emergent’s custom editor tooling and use of built-in language variants to support regional experiences, as well as the way the solution ensured brand and design consistency throughout the site.

Here’s what the jury said:

“Emergent has created an inspiring custom view solution with thumbnails to display the different elements available for editors within their block grid. Emergent's use of the language variant to determine regions is a refreshing use of built-in functionality.”

“They created an optimal user experience for the editor, ensuring brand and design consistency throughout the site”

In many ways, the recognition validates the project’s most important outcome: a CMS that doesn’t just look modern, but actively enables teams to manage complex, global content at scale.

Burford is now equipped with a scalable digital platform that can evolve with their business. New regions, new offices, new content types, and new initiatives can all be handled within the same streamlined system, without custom development for each iteration.