Papendal

Background

Papendal is an organisation of extremes: from Olympic training grounds for elite athletes to large-scale corporate conferences and leisure guests. Their digital presence suffered from information overload. With an enormous offering and a highly diverse audience, the old website tried to tell everything to everyone at once. This led to high bounce rates, a cluttered user experience and a constant stream of support requests via phone and email. Simply because visitors could not find the information they were looking for within the noise of the other business units.

Solution

Digital Layers applied a radical content reduction strategy, combined with an intuitive triple-entry design. The entry experience was split into three distinct pillars: Elite Sports, Business and Leisure. Each pillar received its own visual language and homepage feel, while remaining strictly within the overarching brand guidelines. The focus was on what is truly necessary: unnecessary content was cut and design cues guide users to their destination without friction. At the same time, a central management system was built on Umbraco Cloud, allowing editors to create visually distinct environments from a single central hub. Through smart loading techniques, heavy assets such as images are only loaded when truly necessary, resulting in a lightning-fast experience with a minimal ecological footprint.

Impact

The impact of the new website was immediately measurable. The number of key events increased by 48%, demonstrating that the new site significantly drives visitors to take action. The number of active users grew by 7.7%. Organic Search performs strongly with a 39% increase in conversions, proving the strength of the new content architecture for SEO traffic.

Also notable is the emergence of an entirely new traffic channel: AI Assistant. Traffic via tools such as ChatGPT and other AI-driven search engines already generates sessions with a high engagement rate of 55.8%. This is a direct result of the Generative Engine Optimisation approach used to structure the content. Papendal is now regularly cited as an authoritative source in AI conversations about elite sports and event facilities.

The volume of support requests via email and phone has decreased significantly. The website now functions as a self-service tool where visitors intuitively find their way. The project has been nominated for the Umbraco Awards 2026 in the category Best Designed Site.