Standard Motor Products

Background

Standard Motor Products (NYSE: SMP) is the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of aftermarket automotive parts, selling through warehouse distributors and national retail chains under brands including Standard, Blue Streak, BWD, and Four Seasons. For a parts manufacturer at this scale, the catalog is the business. Technicians and counter professionals need the exact part for a specific year, make, model, and engine, on any device.

SMP's corporate and brand sites were running on Umbraco 7, a version approaching end of life. The 750,000-SKU catalog was embedded through iFrames, which hurt search visibility and the user experience. Content was maintained separately for each brand in English, Spanish, and French, and every layout change needed a developer. SMP required a full rebuild that met WCAG 2.1 AA, served investors and customers from one platform, and could launch new brand sites without starting over.

Solution

Scandia rebuilt smpcorp.com and standardbrand.com on Umbraco 13 as one component-based, multilingual platform. Because Umbraco 7 was being sunset mid-project, an interim upgrade to 7.15 kept the existing sites on patch support during the build.

The catalog was rebuilt as a Blazor application and rendered directly inside Umbraco views, so browsing brand content and drilling into a specific part share the same header, navigation, and brand. Product detail pages carry interactive highlights for fitment and specifications, and a guided funnel routes visitors from a vehicle and a problem to the exact part.

A custom Where to Buy module combines geolocation, radius search, and Excel import for distributor data. Swiftype search, Google Maps, and GA4 are integrated. The design system was delivered in Figma, with 12 to 15 templates built to WCAG 2.1 AA.

Impact

The new corporate and Standard brand sites launched on a shared design system that now powers more than 15 SMP brand properties from one CMS.

Every page is composed on Scandia's widget system. More than 50 configurable components carry their own design options for fonts, spacing, and layout, so an editor picks a variation from a menu instead of filing a ticket, and back office previews show the page as it is being built. Because design options are set at the component level, new pages and new brand sites stay on brand. Corporate and brand teams publish in three languages without a developer.

Average mobile load times improved 22 percent, measured with Google PageSpeed. The 750,000-SKU catalog is fully integrated and indexable, with no iFrames. Each additional brand site launches from the shared component library instead of a new build.

Scandia continues on a monthly retainer covering monitoring, ADA and SEO audits, and new brand rollouts.

You can also read Scandia’s Standard Motor Products Umbraco case study here.