Croudace Homes Website Design & Build
Croudace Homes is an 80-year-old, family-owned housebuilder with more than 23,000 homes behind it and a plan to double its annual output. Its new website had to match that ambition. Crucible designed and built an enterprise WordPress platform that brings COINS, Rightmove and Zoopla, and Occupop together, so buyers, agents and job seekers can find developments, availability and careers in one place.
Arrow icon to scroll to content
What Did Croudace Need?
Croudace had spent years earning a reputation that’s hard to match in housebuilding: 13 consecutive years as an HBF 5 Star builder, with more than 94% of buyers saying they’d recommend it. With a plan to grow from around 600 homes a year to 1,200, the website had to do far more than it was built for. It needed to connect to COINS for plot data, feed listings to Rightmove and Zoopla, run recruitment through Occupop as the business hired to support that growth, and give buyers enough confidence to book a visit.
Search was just as important. Croudace had built up strong organic visibility over many years, and a new platform couldn’t put that at risk. So the brief covered more than design and integrations. It also called for a carefully planned migration that would protect existing rankings and give the business a stronger base for the searches it wasn’t yet winning.
Serving Multiple Audiences
Then there was the audience. Croudace’s website has to work for first-time buyers and growing families, landowners with sites to sell, job seekers, suppliers and existing homeowners logging in for aftercare. Each arrives with a different goal and a different idea of what a housebuilder’s site should give them. The site had to put buyers first while still giving every other audience a clear route to what they needed, without turning into a cluttered directory that served nobody well.
Premium Positioning for Quality Homes
Underpinning all of this was a positioning challenge. Croudace builds premium homes and has eight decades of family ownership behind it, but it competes for buyers against national housebuilders with far bigger marketing budgets. The new site had to feel as polished as any of them while keeping the care and attention to detail that sets a family business apart. The homepage line “Thoughtfully designed communities that inspire better living” captures that balance, and it shaped the design and content decisions that followed.
How Crucible Approached It
We started with discovery, working with the Croudace team to map out the business’s priorities, its audiences and what each part of the site had to achieve before any design began. Integrations got the same scrutiny as the page layouts. We worked through how COINS, Rightmove and Zoopla, and Occupop would each connect to the site, which data had to stay live and where the risks sat. All of it went into a structured brief that the design and development teams worked from throughout.
That groundwork paid off when the scope grew. New requirements came in during the design phase, as they often do on a build this size, and having agreed principles meant we could take them on without losing sight of what the site was for.
Information Architecture
Making the Integrations Do the Heavy Lifting
The integrations were the most technically demanding part of the build. Croudace runs its business on COINS, and the new site had to connect to it properly, so development and plot information comes from the system the business already uses rather than relying on someone to retype it. Listings needed to reach Rightmove and Zoopla accurately, because that’s where a large share of buyers start their search. Recruitment had to run through Occupop, giving candidates a smooth route from the careers pages into Croudace’s hiring process as the business takes on staff to support its growth.
Each integration was planned during discovery, built into the WordPress platform and tested against real data before launch. The result is a site that stays accurate without constant manual updates, freeing the Croudace marketing team to spend their time on content and campaigns instead of keeping three systems in step.
Design
Buying a home is one of the biggest decisions anyone makes, and the design had to reflect that. We gave the site a premium look that matches the quality of Croudace’s homes, with generous photography, clean layouts and plenty of space, so developments are the focus rather than the interface around them. A lot of house hunting happens on a phone, so every template was designed to work as well on mobile as on desktop.
Trust signals are placed where they do the most good. Trustpilot reviews, customer quotes from named developments and figures like 80 years of building and more than 23,000 homes delivered appear early, before a visitor is asked for anything. Calls to action shift with intent. A buyer browsing developments sees gentle prompts to explore and register interest, while someone looking at an individual home with availability is given a clear, direct route to speak to the sales team.
Content That Helps People Buy
Most buyers have questions long before they’re ready to book a visit, and the old approach left them looking for answers elsewhere. We built a News & Insights section so Croudace could publish buying guides and company updates directly, with early pieces covering 2026 Stamp Duty rates for first-time buyers and what to expect when buying a first home with Croudace. A Stamp Duty calculator sits alongside the guides, along with practical sections on Part Exchange, energy efficient homes and the customer charter.
This content does two jobs. It helps buyers feel informed and confident at each stage, and it gives Croudace a steady way to target the questions people type into Google, building search visibility well beyond development and location names.
Built for a Growing Pipeline
With output set to double, Croudace will be launching new developments far more often, and the site had to make that easy. We built a component-based system in WordPress so the marketing team can put together a new development page, from location and specification through to house types, galleries and availability, without needing a developer. Every page follows the same structure, so buyers get a consistent experience whichever development they’re looking at, and each launch goes live with the same SEO groundwork already in place. As the pipeline grows, the website can keep pace without growing the workload behind it.
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.
The Technology Behind It
The site runs on WordPress as an enterprise build, chosen so Croudace’s team can manage content day to day while the platform handles the complexity underneath. Alongside the COINS, Rightmove and Zoopla, and Occupop connections, a Trustpilot integration keeps live reviews on the homepage, existing homeowners have a direct route into the Croudace Connect customer portal, and a Stamp Duty calculator sits within the buying guides. Google Tag Manager runs across the site, so tracking can be added or changed as campaigns evolve without touching the code. Every template was built to be responsive from the start, so the site works just as well on a phone as on a desktop.
I’ve only named tools I could confirm from the live site. If you know which forms plugin, analytics setup or CRM routing Gooey used, tell me and I’ll add a line on enquiry handling, since that’s the one thing the WCI version covers that this doesn’t.
Ready for the Next Chapter
Croudace now has a website that matches the scale of its plans. Buyers can go from the homepage to a specific home with live availability in a few clicks, on whatever device they’re using. Landowners, job seekers, suppliers and existing homeowners each have a clear route to what they need, without getting in the way of the people looking to buy.
Behind the scenes, development and plot data, portal listings and recruitment all connect to the systems Croudace already relies on, so the site stays accurate with far less manual work. New developments can be launched from a consistent set of components, each going live with its SEO groundwork in place. With the migration planned around the visibility Croudace had already built, and a News & Insights section targeting the questions buyers ask before they search for a development, the site gives the business a solid base as it grows its output towards 1,200 homes a year.
An Ongoing Partnership
This is the start of an ongoing relationship. Crucible now looks after Croudace’s SEO and website support on a retainer, building on the foundations laid during the migration and growing the News & Insights content as the business expands. The component system, tracking setup and content structure mean the site can take on new developments, new campaigns and new features without a rebuild. We’re proud of what the Croudace team and Crucible built together, and the work is still going.
If you’re looking for a team to build something properly and stay involved as the business grows, get in touch.