BigHand

A long term partner for BigHand and their Umbraco website.

Back to profile

BigHand has over 25 years’ experience in creating solutions tailored to busy organisations. BigHand gives organisations the tools and data to target key productivity enhancements that create value for your business, your people and your clients. Working across the UK, North America and APAC regions, BigHand has +3,500 customers and over 550,000 users of their technology.

Growing extremely quickly, BigHand was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their previous supplier and was experiencing several issues and growing concerns with the stability of their primary Umbraco-based website. Looking for a best-in-class agency to form a long-term partnership with, they did a thorough review of the market and selected Cantarus, an Umbraco UK Gold Partner, to take over their existing website both in terms of hosting, via KalaniCloud, and ongoing support and website development.

Following an intensive onboarding process where we seamlessly migrated their website to our KalaniCloud hosting service, we did a full high-level site review for BigHand looking for stand-out factors and key aspects of the web estate including performance, personalisation, and an overall technical review of how it had been delivered.

Initially, the site was very slow, and BigHand content editors were unable to make any changes via the standard CMS functionality as the site was so unpredictable. They were eager to improve site performance to ensure a much-improved user experience, no matter where in the world the user might be visiting from.

BigHand was very clear in what they wanted to happen in their digital roadmap of website improvements and Cantarus used this as the basis to commence improvements.

We upgraded their version of Umbraco to improve site stability and allow them to take ownership of their content.

We suggested that BigHand look to fix their Cloudflare configuration to realise both performance and security improvements sitewide.

This resulted in us delivering a 75% improvement in page load times resulting in a much-improved user experience and enhancements in SEO rankings.

Since then, we have gone on to provide a number of projects via our Technical Delivery team, including:

Transforming the ‘Resource Hub’ section with extra filters, prominent CTAs throughout, and content grouping by Resource Type for better, relevant results,
Significant navigations and menu changes,
Providing flexible content templates to enable BigHand to create better content,
Performance review – working with BigHand’s internal team, we did a Cloudflare configuration and automated performance reporting,
3-stage data analytics project – supporting the BigHand digital team in reviewing and improving goals and implementing Google Data Studio,
Digital design observations – high-level site overview and providing suggestions for design changes, future collaboration on any visual improvements,
Ongoing digital strategy and consultancy work.

We have been partnering with BigHand since early 2020 and continue to have a strong working relationship with them, with weekly meetings to discuss the latest updates and upcoming projects.

Through our Customer Success team, BigHand can easily raise feature requests or access any of our professional services, and our dedicated team is able to ensure continual support and proactive account management is delivered in line with expectations.

"Cantarus has been a great support to BigHand as we evolve our digital efforts. Together, we have transformed the website from what it was, into an outstanding Umbraco solution that continues to improve and add value. From the start, Cantarus’ delivery teams have been friendly and professional. We needed a partner that could help us realise our digital strategy and in Cantarus we have found just that."

Briana McCrory, Group Marketing Director