Background
Ascensus needed to modernize a growing group of public-facing websites without rebuilding the same foundation over and over. Their existing setup made it harder to keep branding, components, and governance consistent across brands like Ascensus and FuturePlan, while still allowing each property to manage its own content, workflows, and launch timing. The challenge mattered because the organization needed a more scalable model for future site rollouts, stronger governance around content and SEO, and a cleaner way to support multiple teams with different priorities and approval paths.
Solution
Marcel Digital implemented a multi-site solution on Umbraco Cloud built around Umbraco's Baseline approach. Instead of treating each website as a separate rebuild, Marcel created a shared foundation for design-system components, templates, navigation patterns, and front-end assets, then extended that baseline into child sites for Ascensus, FuturePlan, and future properties. This let the team build reusable components once, distribute updates across sites with Umbraco Cloud Baselines + Deploy, and still give each brand room for site-specific content, permissions, and functionality.
Content migration followed a similar mindset of working smarter rather than rebuilding from scratch. Marcel used Umbraco Deploy to gather and inventory all relevant content from the legacy sites, connected a dedicated user to the new Ascensus environment, and mapped legacy content structures to their new counterparts. From there, the team used Umbraco's MCP server to handle the creation and structuring of content and media within the new CMS, significantly cutting down the back-and-forth typically required between departments during a migration of this scale. The MCP server also streamlined QA, letting the team crawl the migrated content tree to verify it matched expectations far faster than a manual page-by-page review would allow.
Alongside the content migration itself, Marcel's expertise in SEO helped preserve authority post-launch with the implementation of detailed redirect maps for each website, thorough content analyses, and technical SEO.
Impact
The new architecture gave Ascensus a more scalable and practical operating model for its public web presence. Marcel successfully launched both FuturePlan and Ascensus.com on the new platform, while also establishing the shared baseline needed for Advisor Central, Ascensus Academy, and Trust Provident to follow more efficiently. The result was stronger consistency across properties, less duplicated implementation effort, and a clearer path for future enhancements, SEO governance, launch prep, and post-launch improvements.
Results
