A New Website and SEO migration for WCI Group
Crucible delivered digital strategy, website design, development, and SEO for WCI Group, a wastewater and civil engineering business. The engagement covered everything from initial discovery and information architecture through to design, a full component build, CRM integration, and a carefully managed SEO migration.
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What Did WCI Group Need?
WCI had spent years building a business capable of designing, constructing, and maintaining water and wastewater systems under one roof, which is rare in their sector. The problem was that the website gave no indication of it. What had been a single brand entity had grown into four operating divisions (WCI Consulting Engineers, WCI Water and Wastewater Engineers, WCI Service Engineers, and WCI Nutrient Neutrality) and the site had simply not kept pace with that growth.
A pre-brief SEO audit gave the problem some shape. 70% of the crawled site was non-indexable, almost entirely because of a redirect architecture that had built up over time without ever being properly resolved, and despite WCI holding strong organic positions for commercially valuable terms like “sewage consultants”, “septic tank surveyor”, and “waste water engineers UK”, the underlying numbers told a different story. Conversions had fallen by 70 period-on-period, engaged sessions were declining, and a Domain Trust score of 12 left the business poorly positioned to compete for the terms it was not yet ranking for.
Serving Multiple Audiences
There was also the question of the audience. WCI serves five quite different user types, from commercial developers and local authority buyers through to domestic property owners, each arriving with different expectations, different levels of technical knowledge, and different things they need to see before they get in touch. The site had to speak to all of them clearly and with confidence, without becoming so broad that it stopped saying anything useful to any of them.
Defining a Position
Underpinning all of this was a positioning challenge. WCI wanted the new site to reflect a business that is professional and technically authoritative without feeling corporate or remote. The phrase that came out of our discovery session was “the engineering partner you trust, not the one shouting the loudest,” and that became the lens through which every design and content decision was made.
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What Approach did Crucible take?
We invested heavily in the discovery and strategy phase before any design work began, running a detailed session with the WCI team to work through the business’s priorities, its audiences, and the things it specifically wanted to avoid. That last part turned out to be just as valuable as the brief itself. WCI was clear that the site should not drift towards feeling corporate or faceless, that conversion pressure in the wrong places would undermine rather than support credibility, and that clarity had to come before visual ambition. We documented those principles in a structured brief that the design team worked from throughout the project.
Information Architecture
The information architecture was one of the most significant pieces of work on this project. With four divisions, 35 service pages, and five distinct audience types, the structure had to be both comprehensive and immediately navigable. We resolved this around a clear division gateway under a “What We Do” section, giving each division its own landing page, its own service pages, and its own case study pathway, while ensuring the homepage and top-level navigation made WCI’s vertical integration legible from the moment someone arrived. The goal was that a commercial developer and a domestic homeowner could both land on the same homepage and each know exactly where to go within a few seconds.
Design
The design process involved careful thinking about tone and visual language across the four divisions. The Nutrient Neutrality section needed to feel scientific and consultancy-led, appropriate for developers and environmental officers navigating regulatory requirements. The Service Engineers section needed to feel operational and reliable, suited to facilities managers who need confidence that a job will be handled quickly. Getting that differentiation right without fragmenting the overall brand required a lot of considered decision-making around layout, imagery selection, typography weight, and the calibration of calls to action. For service areas where intent is clear and urgency matters, CTAs are prominent and direct. For consulting and advisory services, where the relationship needs to be established first, they are quieter and contextual.
Photography and Visual Language
WCI had commissioned professional on-site photography before design began, which made a real difference to how the site feels. We worked with that library to set a visual register that is grounded in real people, real environments, and genuine project work, replacing the kind of generic PPE-and-hard-hat stock imagery that makes most engineering sites look interchangeable. The teardrop brand mark was used as a subtle structural anchor rather than a repeated decorative motif, and motion was kept minimal and purposeful throughout, in keeping with the “engineering precision” tone the brief called for.
The Case Study System
The case study system was built to serve two purposes. On the site, case studies appear alongside relevant service pages and aggregate in a central filterable hub. They are also structured to export cleanly as PDFs, so a single piece of content production serves both the website and the downloadable format that professional and public sector buyers tend to expect. Given how central case studies are to WCI’s credibility with commercial clients, making them easy to maintain, find, and share was a practical priority from the start.
SEO Migration
The SEO migration was planned and executed with a level of care that the complexity of the existing site demanded. We mapped 300 URLs individually to clean canonical equivalents, preserved all ranking page slugs through the migration, wrote unique title tags and meta descriptions for every indexable page, and enforced the single-H1-per-page rule at template level to prevent the issues from recurring. Core Web Vitals were built to target from the outset rather than tested against at the end. On launch day, WCI’s top positions held.
What Technology Was Used?
The site runs on WordPress, built as a component-led system with modular, reorderable blocks across six master templates covering each division and key site sections. WCI does not need regular internal CMS access and is comfortable briefing changes through us, so the priority was a reliable, maintainable setup that could grow with the business without needing structural work each time something changes.
Gravity Forms handles enquiry routing, with division-specific submissions going to a general inbox and feeding directly into WCI’s ACT CRM. GA4 and Hotjar are implemented with event tracking across form submissions, click-to-calls, and document downloads, giving WCI a clear view of where enquiries come from and how users move through the site. Google Maps is embedded for office location and service coverage, reCAPTCHA handles spam protection, and a chatbot for FAQs is scoped and ready for Phase 2.
A Site That Reflects the Full Scope of the Business
WCI Group now has a site that reflects what the business actually is. The four-division structure comes through at every level, in the navigation, in the way each section is written, and in the way imagery and tone shift as users move between them. Visitors who arrive looking for nutrient neutrality consultancy and visitors who arrive needing emergency pump maintenance both find a site that feels like it was built with them in mind, because it was.
The rankings WCI had built over years came through the migration intact, and the content gaps that had been holding back high-value terms now have well-optimised pages with the depth needed to compete for them. The site the business had before was holding it back. This one is built to move it forward.
An Ongoing Partnership
This is the start of an ongoing relationship for us. The component architecture, the analytics setup, and the content structure are all built to grow with the business, supporting new services, new case studies, and new geographic markets without requiring a rebuild each time. We are proud of what the WCI team and Crucible built together, and we are continuing to develop it.
If you’re looking for a team to build something properly and stay involved as the business grows, get in touch.