The Client
Rathbones is a leading UK wealth manager, providing investment management and wealth planning services to individuals, families, charities, and professional advisors. Operating across both wealth and asset management, Rathbones serves a broad range of clients and audiences through its flagship digital platform, Rathbones.com.
The Situation
Rathbones needed to consolidate two separate digital platforms serving distinct Wealth Management and Asset Management audiences into a single, authoritative digital presence to support the launch of a new brand and visual identity. The consolidated platform needed to serve diverse audiences clearly and consistently, establish a unified market position, and operate within Rathbones' highly regulated FCA environment.
Rathbones' core objectives were to:
- Strengthen brand visibility and market position by establishing a single, authoritative digital presence representing Rathbones as one organization while effectively supporting distinct Wealth and Asset Management audiences
- Improve operational efficiency by reducing the duplication, cost, and complexity of running two separately hosted and managed digital platforms
- Deliver a flexible, scalable platform capable of supporting future business growth, regulatory change, and new service propositions
- Improve customer experience and journey clarity across both audiences, enabling faster access to relevant information and supporting lead generation
- Embed robust governance, compliance, and structured publishing workflows within the FCA-regulated environment, including WCAG-aligned accessibility standards to meet Consumer Duty obligations
- Successfully deliver and launch the new platform within a three-month timeframe to support the brand launch
The Challenge
Rathbones needed to establish a single, authoritative digital presence that could serve its two distinct audiences clearly and consistently, without fragmenting the experience or diluting the new brand.
But the company’s existing infrastructure made that goal difficult. Running two separately hosted platforms had led to content duplication, inconsistent editorial workflows, and fragmented user journeys that failed to guide audiences to relevant information. Legacy technical architecture also limited SEO scalability, creating a material risk to organic visibility during the transition — significant for an organization where organic search accounted for 80% of funds under management (FUM).
Operating within a highly FCA-regulated environment added further complexity. Regulated fund documentation, disclosures, and legally required content needed to be published, versioned, and audited with confidence, while accessibility standards had to meet Consumer Duty obligations across all audiences.
Further complicating the situation, Rathbones had a tight timeline: it needed its redesign completed within a three-month window to align with its new brand launch.
The Solution
Rathbones engaged Acquia partner Paragon DCX to deliver the consolidated platform across two phases. During the first phase, DCX conducted a full audit of both existing sites, covering content, UX, design language, taxonomy, and technical architecture. The audit surfaced critical issues, including duplication, fragmentation, inconsistent editorial workflows, and a lack of cohesive visual and interaction standards. Working closely with stakeholders through a series of co-creation workshops, DCX shaped a coherent consolidation plan aligned to the launch milestone.
Rather than creating page-by-page mockups, DCX treated design as a system, developing a component-led design system defining reusable patterns for content blocks, navigation elements, layouts, and interactive modules. The team intentionally mapped each design component to Site Studio components from the outset, ensuring the visual and UX system evolved in parallel with the technical architecture. This approach also meant that as user research continued to surface new findings throughout the program, Rathbones and DCX could adapt the experience without compromising delivery pace or platform stability. DCX identified Acquia CMS with Site Studio as the most appropriate foundation for the consolidated platform, with Acquia Cloud's enterprise-grade security, role-based permissions, and controlled deployment environments particularly critical within Rathbones' FCA-regulated context.
In the second phase, DCX led the engineering and technical architecture of the new consolidated platform on Acquia Cloud Platform. Key deliverables included:
- New tooling, environments, and codebase setup within Acquia Cloud Platform, forming the foundation for future scalability
- Configuration of a unified CMS structure aligned to the consolidated information architecture, enabling both sites to operate seamlessly within a single Drupal instance
- Accessibility-first component engineering, embedding WCAG best practice into Acquia Site Studio modules to ensure regulatory document access, keyboard navigation compliance, and improved readability across all core templates
- Automated content migration scripts with taxonomy unification and content provenance tagging, directly addressing the fragmentation and SEO risk that had characterized the legacy estate, and enabling teams to distinguish content originating from Rathbones.com versus AssetManagement.com for governance and analytics
- Analytics foundation setup including dataLayer specification, GA4 configuration, Hotjar deployment, and custom dashboards aligned to the newly defined KPIs
Throughout both phases, Acquia Cloud Platform provided stable, repeatable environments for automated migration cycles, allowing DCX to iterate safely without impacting Rathbones' live operations.
The Results
The launch delivered transformational results across every meaningful performance indicator. What began as a complex migration and structural overhaul rapidly evolved into a step-change in brand visibility, competitive position, user engagement, and commercial contribution. Crucially, these gains weren’t short-term spikes but sustained improvements, supported by a stable, future-ready platform that evolves alongside AI-driven search and changing user behavior.
Brand visibility and market position
- Sistrix search visibility increased 110%
- Unbranded first-page keyword rankings increased 82%
- Market ranking improved from 94th to 17th across 450 tracked keywords
- Organic impressions increased 107% immediately post-launch, with a sustained 25% uplift
- Organic contribution to FUM increased from 80% to 88%
- Approximately 20 Google AI Overview appearances per month established
- Ranked second highest brand across 8 LLMs versus 11 competitors
Operational efficiency and time to market
- 197 tickets delivered over 15 weeks, a 600% increase versus the 2024 average
- Full migration delivered within the defined 15-week window to support the brand launch
- Post-migration visibility remained 106% above the pre-migration baseline
- Major content consolidation completed with no sustained organic performance decline
Scalability and future readiness
- Organic new user growth increased 16.6% year over year, from 60,000 to 70,000, in the comparable periods
- Mobile sessions increased 45%, from 36,483 to 52,752
- Sustained click growth of 10% and impression growth of 25%
- AI search visibility established across major platforms
Customer experience and journey clarity
- Engagement time increased from 46 to 52 seconds, a 13% improvement
- Active users increased 3.4%; new users increased 3.6%
- On-site search interactions per session increased 147%, from 691 to 1,711
- Hotjar user satisfaction rating of 4.0 out of 5.0
Governance, compliance, and accessibility
- Accessibility score improved from 65 to 90 out of 100, supporting Consumer Duty obligations
- Organic FUM contribution increased from 80% to 88%, and remained above the pre-migration baseline
- 450-keyword set actively monitored for ongoing SEO resilience
Looking ahead, the platform's future-ready architecture positions Rathbones to adopt Acquia Web Governance, Acquia Search powered by Searchstax, and Acquia Conversion Optimization in the next phase of enhancements, ensuring its digital experience continues to evolve alongside AI-driven search and changing user behavior.