Beyond WordPress Limits: How Industrial SME Creatz3D Unlocked Growth with Webflow

Creatz3D, Singapore's leading additive manufacturing partner since 2012, faced challenges with their 13-year-old WordPress website. It suffered from an outdated design, poor performance, a significant maintenance burden for their marketing manager, and ineffective lead generation. Underscore executed a comprehensive migration to Webflow, involving a full redesign, strategic content pruning, performance optimization, and integration work. Launched successfully before the critical ITAP 2025 trade show, the new site delivered significant performance gains (40-60% faster load times), a +184.5% surge in post-launch users, improved SEO quality (+5.3% CTR), and empowered Creatz3D's marketing team.

Underscore developed a multi-faceted strategy to address Creatz3D's challenges, focusing on performance, long-term manageability, and B2B lead quality:

• Platform Selection (Webflow): Webflow was strategically chosen over WordPress for its inherent performance advantages, superior design flexibility, user-friendly CMS empowering the client's team, high reliability eliminating maintenance burdens, and scalable architecture suitable for Creatz3D's complex offerings.
• Strategic Content Pruning: Recognizing that migrating all 800+ pages was impractical and detrimental, a data-driven content audit was conducted. Hundreds of low-performing, outdated blog posts and pages (often with minimal or zero views) were identified for retirement. This strategic pruning aimed to improve the site's overall quality score and search relevance by allowing retired pages to 404 naturally.‍
• SEO Preservation & Enhancement: While pruning low-value content, a meticulous plan was executed to protect the SEO equity of high-value commercial pages and essential blog posts. This included comprehensive 301 redirect mapping and building the new site with strong technical SEO foundations (clean structure, optimized metadata) from the start.‍
• Modern Redesign & User Experience (UX): A complete visual overhaul was undertaken, aligning the design with Creatz3D's brand guidelines and drawing inspiration from key partner Stratasys for a modern, authoritative aesthetic. The user journey was re-evaluated to simplify navigation and focus on driving high-quality B2B interactions.

Creatz3D's long-standing WordPress site, built in their early years, had become a significant obstacle to their business goals and brand image. The core issues were:

• Operational Inefficiency: The site was described as "tedious to maintain," requiring excessive time and technical caution from the single marketing manager for simple updates, hindering marketing agility.
• Brand Misalignment: The 13-year-old design failed to reflect Creatz3D's status as an industry leader and partner to major global technology firms like Stratasys.
• Poor User Experience & Performance: Slow load times created frustration, particularly for time-pressed B2B decision-makers like engineers and procurement managers, leading to potential lost interest and opportunities.
• Ineffective Lead Generation: Generating only around 200 leads per year, the website was underperforming significantly as a business development tool. Previous SEO investments hadn't translated into valuable conversions.
• Confusing Information Architecture: With over 800 pages accumulated over years, including 600+ blog posts, the site's structure was overwhelming ("a freaking puzzle"), making it difficult for users to navigate their extensive product and service offerings.

The migration to Webflow yielded immediate and significant improvements across key metrics:

• Dramatic Performance Transformation: The new site demonstrated substantial technical excellence. Standard Lighthouse audit scores saw marked improvements across all categories (Performance +9%, Accessibility +17%, SEO +11%), and crucial Core Web Vitals achieved a perfect 100% pass rate. Most importantly for user experience, mobile page load times decreased by an impressive 40-60% compared to the old WordPress site.
• Significant Traffic Surge Post-Launch: The strategic launch timing just before the ITAP 2025 event, combined with the site's improved performance and visibility, resulted in a massive influx of visitors. In the first 14 days post-launch, Total Users increased by +184.5% and New Users grew by +193.1%, validating the site's ability to capture event-driven interest.
• Improved SEO Effectiveness: The strategic content pruning proved highly effective. While overall impressions decreased as intended (-27%), the site's average Click-Through Rate (CTR) in search results increased by +5.3%. This indicates that the remaining content was more relevant to search queries, attracting better-qualified traffic. Crucial commercial keyword rankings were successfully maintained throughout the migration.
• Enhanced Conversion Path Signals: Traffic to the high-intent "Contact Us" page increased by +57.4%. Although a temporary post-launch tracking glitch obscured exact form submission numbers, the significant rise in visitors reaching this key conversion point, coupled with a drastically reduced engagement time (indicating efficient information finding), strongly suggested an improved conversion pathway for qualified B2B prospects.

The migration was executed through a collaborative and agile process, adapting to complexities and ensuring the final platform met Creatz3D's specific needs:
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• Future-Proof CMS Architecture: A scalable and intuitive Webflow CMS was built using Collections. Critically, the structure prioritized flexibility by organizing content around technologies (e.g., "Polymer," "Metal") rather than locking it to specific vendor brands, allowing Creatz3D to easily add new partners in the future. Intricate product hierarchies were clarified through detailed discussions and rebuilt logically within the CMS.
• Enhanced B2B User Experience: The UX was refined significantly. Gated content ("Download Brochure") was strategically replaced with direct "Contact Us" funnels, shifting focus from quantity to quality of leads. Navigation was streamlined, simplifying the path for new prospects by relocating post-sale support information. The implementation of reusable design components empowered the Creatz3D team to make sitewide updates efficiently.
• Comprehensive Content Migration & Population: All essential legacy content, including hundreds of blog posts, case studies, and event pages identified for retention, was systematically migrated from the WordPress export. The creation and population of entirely new, detailed sections for Products, Materials, Industries, and Applications involved significant collaborative effort, combining Underscore's data extraction with Creatz3D's subject matter expertise for new copywriting .

• Navigating CRM Integration: Underscore successfully integrated the new website's forms with Creatz3D's chosen CRM, ClaritySoft. This required developing workarounds for the CRM's limitations (like custom fields and text area inputs) using custom code and engaging directly with Clarity Soft's support team to resolve technical hurdles and ensure reliable lead capture. We also implemented custom security feature help tackle bot challenges.
• Agile Development & Phased Launch: The website was developed in manageable stages ("batches"), with progress shared regularly via a live staging link for continuous client review and feedback. To ensure the new site was live before the crucial ITAP 2025 trade show, a phased launch strategy was employed: core commercial pages were launched first, followed by the newly created content sections (Industries, Applications) as they were finalized post-launch. After thorough QA and final client approval, the site successfully went live on October 10, 2025.