Exclusive Networks

Background

Exclusive Networks is a global cybersecurity specialist operating across more than 50 countries. Despite their market leadership, their digital infrastructure had become a critical business liability.

NXT Digital Solutions conducted a comprehensive two-phase discovery — a technical and UX audit followed by a face-to-face discovery workshop — that revealed the following:

Critical business risks: No disaster recovery plan, no multi-factor authentication, and all global domains hosted on a single server, creating a catastrophic single point of failure. WordPress was running outdated plugins with active GDPR non-compliance across all domains, including cookie consent that failed to meet CNIL requirements for the French market.

Catastrophic SEO failures: A full crawl of the estate uncovered 150,282 URLs in total, of which 1,386 live URLs were returning 400/500 error codes. Four sitemaps from the Yoast plugin were failing entirely, leaving 1,370 pages undiscoverable by search engines. On mobile, zero good URLs were being indexed — 115 URLs were flagged as failing Core Web Vitals — putting an estimated 12–25% of annual traffic at risk. The average Google ranking position across all indexed queries sat at 24.5, with a click-through rate of just 1.2% from 2.21 million impressions.

Poor user experience: 14 confusing navigation options with no clear hierarchy, oversized video assets up to 3.34MB served directly from EXN hosting, images up to 25MB with over 80% missing alt text, and a Lighthouse performance score of just 30/100 on mobile microsites (LCP 22.8s, TBT 3,060ms).

No global content management: Each country operated in complete isolation with no ability to share vendor content, events, leads, or resources across markets. Analytics showed 14,000 of 15,000 visitors were first-time users, indicating almost no retention. There was no mechanism for global teams to push content to regional sites, and no structured way to manage the 20,000+ web pages or URL architecture at scale.

The result was a global enterprise with no editorial governance, no security resilience, no search visibility, and no platform for growth or shared global content management.

Solution

NXT delivered a complete enterprise digital transformation built on Umbraco as the strategic platform, structured across five pillars:

• Enterprise Umbraco Architecture A single Umbraco installation managing 52 sub-sites across 50 countries and 28 languages — replacing a fragmented WordPress estate that had accumulated 150,282 URLs, 503 active 302 temporary redirects, and 50+ 404 errors in an 11-hour window at the time of audit. Multi-tiered OKTA authentication with global super-admin, regional, and local editor roles. Azure cloud hosting with hardened security, DDoS protection, disaster recovery, and managed publishing workflows. A modular block-builder editing framework with reusable, brand-consistent design components.

• AI-Powered Localisation and Content Migration All legacy WordPress content was extracted and restructured using AI to map into the new block-based Umbraco architecture. A multilingual translation pipeline was built using DeepL as the primary engine and ChatGPT to cover language gaps — enabling all 28 languages to be served with localised content. AI was used to remap and manage 20,000+ URL redirects, a process now handled natively inside Umbraco by editors. Claude Sonnet via Windsurf IDE was used to optimise the site codebase for Core Web Vitals performance and localised SEO metadata across the full estate — directly targeting the failures that had produced a mobile Lighthouse score of 30/100 and zero indexed good URLs on mobile.

• Editorial Experience and Content Operations 52 independent sub-sites, each with their own Umbraco editing environment, sharing a global design system and governance layer. Global marketing managers can push campaigns and content to all markets simultaneously; local teams retain full autonomy. Each market has its own HubSpot CRM integration with independent landing pages and lead capture forms. Workday HR integration automates job listing management across relevant sub-sites. Micro-site and campaign landing page tooling gives regional teams the ability to respond to opportunities without engineering resource.

Umbraco's multilingual block list editing features gave global marketing managers control over page structure at scale — supporting both locked-down fixed layouts and flexible block-builder experiences, with vary-by-culture and non-vary-by-culture blocks enabling dynamic regional sublayouts where needed.

• We created a translation engine, the translation engine's core logic flattens deeply nested block list content, making each entry individually addressable. From this, the system generates Delta objects — each containing a Delta key that encodes the precise address of a translatable piece of content, alongside the translated value to be applied. An API layer accepts arrays of Deltas, giving the system the flexibility to support multiple translation workflows from a single underlying mechanism.

In practice, this powers two primary interfaces. A grid editing environment presents all flattened content side-by-side across language variants, allowing editors to update individual cells and generate a list of Deltas for application. The same methodology underpins the AI translation pipeline — dispatch classes extract all translatable content from a document type, serialise it, and send it to DeepL or OpenAI. Responses are returned as Delta arrays and applied through the same engine.

On update, the engine re-flattens content, uses node-walking to locate the specific target, and applies the change. Block list JSON is then reconstructed via recursion, saved, and published.

The architecture also lends itself to extension beyond these workflows. Because all translatable content is serialised into addressable Delta structures, exporting to standard formats — including XLIFF, PO, TMX, and Excel — is straightforward, with a key map file generated alongside to enable accurate re-import. This would allow content to be passed to external translation agencies or CAT tools, with translated output applied back through the same Delta engine.

• SEO, Performance and Analytics Structured global sitemaps resolving the 1,300+ indexing failures caused by the legacy Yoast plugin. AI-assisted SEO and Core Web Vitals optimisation via Claude Sonnet, addressing the 57% of pages missing meta descriptions, 76% of URLs with incorrectly structured HREF lang attributes, and over 65% of page titles that were missing or duplicated. Modern image formats (WebP/SVG) replacing the legacy JPEG/PNG/GIF estate where individual assets were as large as 25MB. Third-party video hosting eliminating the bandwidth overhead of on-server video files (previously up to 3.34MB per file). A global analytics architecture supporting consolidated reporting alongside independent regional performance dashboards.

Impact

Security and business continuity: Eliminated the single point of failure — all global domains had previously shared one server with no active DR plan, no MFA, and only manual backups managed by the incumbent agency. Achieved GDPR compliance across all 50 country domains, including CNIL-compliant cookie consent for the French market. Deployed MFA via OKTA and implemented comprehensive disaster recovery protocols — directly resolving every critical risk identified at audit.

Search visibility: Over 1,300 previously unindexed pages made discoverable, resolving the four failed Yoast sitemaps that had been blocking 1,370 pages from search engines. 20,000+ URL redirects managed and maintained internally, protecting all legacy organic equity through migration — including 503 temporary 302 redirects converted to permanent 301s. Mobile performance restored from zero indexed good URLs to a fully CWV-compliant global estate, recovering the estimated 12–25% of annual traffic that had been at risk. Localised SEO structures built across 28 languages, addressing the 76% of URLs that had incorrectly structured HREF lang attributes and enabling each market to build independent search authority.

Editorial productivity: 52 local marketing teams now operate independently within a governed, brand-consistent CMS — without IT or developer dependency for day-to-day content. Tasks that previously required developer involvement — redirect management, URL architecture, campaign landing pages, and translations — are now handled entirely by editors inside Umbraco. The platform that once had no conversion tracking and no formal events or goals in Google Analytics now supports segmented lead capture and CRM population per market.

Global content operations: Global campaigns can be distributed from a central team to all 52 markets simultaneously. Vendor content, partner information, events, and resources can be shared globally or regionally — transforming a fragmented multi-site estate where 14 of every 15 visitors were arriving for the first time and never returning into a collaborative, retention-focused content network.

Commercial operations: Clean, segmented HubSpot lead data for all 50 countries. Regional teams can respond to market opportunities with independent micro-sites and landing pages, without central bottlenecks.

Sustainability was a core design principle, not an afterthought. Every architectural decision was made to reduce future cost, complexity, and dependency.

Eliminating WordPress sprawl: Moving from a fragmented, plugin-dependent multi-site WordPress estate — one that had accumulated 150,282 URLs, out-of-date plugins across every site, manual backup schedules, and no source control — to a single Umbraco installation dramatically reduces ongoing security surface, update complexity, and maintenance overhead.

Editor self-sufficiency: By empowering regional teams to manage content, redirects, translations, landing pages, and analytics inside Umbraco, the platform significantly reduces long-term agency dependency and development cost. The redirect management alone — previously requiring developer time for each of the 20,000+ URL changes — is now entirely editor-operated.

AI-assisted code optimisation: Using Claude Sonnet via Windsurf IDE to review and optimise the codebase carried forward a leaner, higher-quality build — reducing the technical debt that would otherwise compound over time. The legacy codebase had produced a Lighthouse score of 30/100 on mobile; the new build targets full CWV compliance at scale.

Modular block architecture: The design system is extensible by nature. New features, page types, and markets can be added within the existing structure without rebuilding what exists — protecting the investment in the current platform.

Performance and bandwidth: The switch to WebP/SVG imagery and CDN-served video across 50 markets meaningfully reduces bandwidth consumption and energy footprint at scale. Individual image assets had previously reached 25MB; video files were being served directly from EXN hosting at up to 3.34MB per file. Both patterns have been resolved at the architectural level.

Structured SLA support: NXT provides ongoing ticketed support including security and performance audits, with version management and feature releases handled within a governed cycle — preventing the technical debt accumulation that caused the original crisis.