British Council 2

This case study is part two of a four-stage programme. The full context, including the fragmented estate JBi inherited and the research that underpinned the consolidation strategy, is in  Case Study 1: Technical and UX Discovery.

By the time this phase began, the strategic direction was set. The problem was no longer what to build, but how to get there safely. The global TakeIELTS website was running on Drupal 7, which reached its official end-of-life date in January 2025. That date marked the point at which the Drupal Security Team would cease issuing patches or advisories. Continued operation required interim vendor support while the full migration was completed. The contracted go-live target was June 2025, and the brief was to hit it without missing a beat.

The site was also carrying years of accumulated SEO debt. Redirect chains, broken links, duplicate content signals diluting search performance, and thousands of pages that search engines were treating as empty. Migrating without addressing these would transfer every problem to the new platform.

JBi's brief was unambiguous: migrate the entire site by the contracted go-live date, clean up the SEO estate first, and do not touch anything else. No new features, no design changes, no content updates. Get it across safely.

A deadline that could not move

The go-live target was fixed: 24 June 2025. The British Council operates a commercially significant site in a competitive market. Every week of delay extended the period on interim-supported infrastructure. Missing the date was not an option.

Scope that grew during the project

During the initial technical assessment, JBi identified 16 country sites on the legacy server that had not been in the original scope. They had been added to the domain after the project was agreed, and none had been flagged to JBi. JBi raised these with the client and all were added to the migration, bringing the total to 13,063 pages.

Two tracks running at the same time

The SEO cleanup could not follow migration, because errors carried forward would contaminate the new platform. It could not replace migration, because the security deadline was fixed. JBi's SEO team worked on the live site at the same time as the engineering team was rebuilding it. Coordinating those two tracks without interference required close management throughout.

A strict boundary around scope

The brief explicitly prohibited improvements. Any addition, whether a new feature or a navigation change, introduced risk to the deadline. JBi held that boundary throughout. When client pressure pushed toward additional changes, JBi held firm. That discipline was itself a meaningful part of delivery.

Clean first, then migrate

JBi's SEO team ran the cleanup before migration began. Carrying thousands of existing errors into a new platform risks amplifying them as search engines re-crawl a changed environment. The cleanup covered the full site, over 13,000 pages, with three headline improvements: pages blocked from crawling fell from 122 to 48, internal redirect chains from 76 to 41, and pages not contributing to search rankings from 1,443 to 795.

Source: JBi Digital Stage 1 KPI Report v2.2, September 2025.

The migration

The engineering team ran a like-for-like migration. The legacy environment was cloned, the codebase was rebuilt on a modern, supported Drupal 10 architecture, content was moved as-is, and the existing design was re-implemented exactly. Quality control ran alongside development throughout, across three separate environments, so nothing reached the live site without being checked first.

Go-live: 24 June 2025

The site went live on 24 June 2025, within the original contract deadline. As part of the controlled switchover, the site was intentionally hidden from search engine crawlers for three days. This caused an expected, planned pause in crawling.

Getting the data right

Shortly after go-live, performance data shared by the client showed very promising results: 

Source: JBi Digital KPI report, October 2025.

The headline result

• Impressions: +21% (approximately 70 million more vs the prior period).
• Clicks: +17% (0.24 million more vs the prior period).
• Organic sessions: +22% over 92 days post go-live.
• Bounce rate: down 35.6%, from 11.5% to 7.41%.

9-week pre/post comparison

Year-on-year funnel performance (24 June to 10 September, 2024 vs 2025)

• Impressions: +28.2% (from 26.4 million to 33.8 million).
• Total users: +11.5%.
• Purchase intent events: +7.2% (organic: +8.0%).
• High-intent interactions: +12.9%.
• Conversion rate: +4.81% (organic).

Security

• Zero vulnerabilities identified post-launch.
• Full Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) compliance achieved.
• Modern security architecture in place: stronger password hashing, multi-factor authentication, improved encryption, and a web application firewall and content delivery network protecting and accelerating the site globally

All objectives met

In their words

“JBi supported us with the replatform and SEO clean-up of our global IELTS site. The team was highly knowledgeable, and the project manager kept everything on track, even helping us speed up delivery. The KPI results exceeded expectations, and overall, their service was excellent.”Lucia Vega, Marketing Strategy & Digital Growth Leader, British Council