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Hillsong
Multi-site infrastructure empowering global team
Backed by multi-site, with enhanced navigation, 4mation built a new website for Hillsong that focused on best practice design improvements, optimised site speed, a new editor experience, and seamless transition of content.
The story
Located in over 28 city centres around the world, Hillsong is a contemporary Christian church that required multi-site infrastructure for its global audience. With an average global attendance of 150,000 people weekly, Hillsong needed a new website that would serve their international community with timely and geographically relevant information.
We started with Hillsong by performing a scoping workshop focused on customer and administrator pain points. The goal was to have multi-site infrastructure in place that allowed for simple and beautiful location-specific websites. We needed the ability to migrate all of the current site content; plus an easy backend editor experience for administrators.
“The website exceeded our expectations. Our global online community now have better access to our content, and we are positioned like never before to empower autonomy for a global team of editors and drive innovation. 4mation understood the user experience and partnered with us to provide the most cost-effective and scalable solution.”
Adam Smith, Head of Digital, Hillsong Church
“We are delighted with the work delivered by 4mation and appreciated their expertise throughout the entire project. Their ability to rally together and work through any blockers gave us peace of mind that our online presence was in good hands.”
Madeleine Atkins, Hillsong
The challenge
The old site had slow page speeds and unexpected bugs, which brought the site down or impacted accessibility for users. The editing functionality was also playing havoc with web pages and caused frustration for editors and users alike.
Hillsong tasked us with migrating the site content whilst also allowing them access to a CMS where they can edit and manage their content. In addition to the requirement of a multi-region/brand setup, 4mation also had to enable the site to support multiple languages.
One of the greatest challenges was the volume of content to migrate. The complexity of the Hillsong website meant that we had to perform stringent regression testing on over 50 000 URLs. We had to ensure that the pages were accessible and that SEO risks were mitigated.
We built detailed test cases for user journeys, as well as scripts to identify missing data in the migrated pages. Developing an automation tool covering the essentials of a page’s elements, we ensured that it was quick to customise and easy to build on as new functionality is added.
New infrastructure was designed and implemented on Amazon Web Services to provide a more secure and cost-effective platform for their new multi-site. The existing site was in WordPress, and consultation with Hillsong determined that WordPress was still the best solution for their needs. With the multi-site infrastructure and setup complete, 4mation migrated all of Hillsong’s content over onto the new site.
The result
Collaboration and tenacity were critical to the successful delivery of the website. Transitioning gigabytes worth of valuable content, 4mation improved the website page speed and the editing experience for administrators. Hillsong experienced a seamless cutover, and performance has been outstanding ever since.
4mation went above and beyond to meet the project timeline, delivering Hillsong a multi-region website accessible in 16 different languages. With thousands of daily visitors, we built the Hillsong website on new cloud infrastructure that is robust, secure and scalable.
If you have any questions around our web development services, please let us know. Our team would be more than happy to talk through any current challenges and how we can work with you.
