Publish-to-Live Under 10 Minutes with 18.4% CTR Lift Through a Zero-Downtime Re-Platform

An ASX-listed pathology provider replaced its developer-gated Umbraco CMS with an editor-triggered Contentful, Eleventy, and AWS pipeline. 94% of content migrated in 60 days, search performance protected through cutover, and a small editorial team now ships to production every four hours without a developer in the loop.

The Challenge

Australian Clinical Labs is an ASX-listed pathology provider with hundreds of collection centres nationally. Its public website ran on Umbraco — a traditional .NET CMS with server-side rendering. Over time, the platform had become the bottleneck rather than the enabler of content.

Every meaningful content change required developer involvement to deploy. There was no self-service publishing for marketing or communications. Hundreds of desktop URLs were failing Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds, and the site had zero structured data of any kind in Search Console — no breadcrumbs, no FAQ rich results, no schema.org markup at all.

The brief was uncompromising: migrate the entire public website to a modern headless CMS, on time, on budget, and with zero downtime — while preserving search performance for a property generating 300,000+ organic clicks every quarter.

The Solution

NETEVO designed and delivered a composable content platform built around Contentful as a genuine content graph rather than a flat-page CMS. Seventeen content types, thirty-six reference fields, and eleven page-template variants gave editors the structure to compose pages from re-usable components — and gave the build pipeline enough metadata to derive structured data, navigation, and routing automatically.

Eleventy renders the entire site as static HTML at build time. Jenkins watches Contentful for publishes, triggers a build, syncs to S3, and invalidates CloudFront — typically in under ten minutes from publish click to live edge. AWS Lambda powers the editorial preview environment and the contact form backend, keeping patient form submissions inside the AWS account boundary with no third-party form services.

Our Approach

Content graph, not flat pages: Seventeen Contentful content types and thirty-six reference fields modelling pages, articles, pathologists, tests, locations, navigation, and site configuration. Eleven template variants routed by a templatePage field, so editors choose page layout from inside Contentful with no developer involvement.
Schema.org auto-derived at build: Nine variant schema builders generate breadcrumbs from content hierarchy, FAQ from rich-text H3 headings, and MedicalBusiness + LocalBusiness markup for locations. Editors cannot accidentally break structured data — it is machine-generated and machine-validated.
Editor-triggered, sub-10-minute pipeline: Contentful webhook → Jenkins build → S3 sync → CloudFront invalidation. No developer in the loop for content changes. concurrent-build protection and a 30-minute timeout guard the pipeline.
Location finder powered by an external feed: Thirty-eight Contentful location entries hold metadata; an external eHealth JSON feed supplies real-time hours, services, and open/closed status. One component generates individually indexed, rankable pages for the entire national collection-centre network.
Zero-downtime cutover with redirect discipline: Disciplined URL mapping from Umbraco to the new Contentful-driven URL space preserved equity through go-live on 14 January 2026. Brand-query traffic remained flat through the migration window.

The Results

The migration completed on time, on budget, and with no traffic cliff. Within five weeks of go-live, every desktop Core Web Vitals failure inherited from the Umbraco platform had been resolved. Within twelve weeks, click-through rate from Google had improved by 18.4% and average position by three full spots.

Editorial throughput now sits at 159 publishes per month — roughly one every four hours — handled by three client editors with no developer involvement and no support tickets to engineering. Structured data, which did not exist on the previous platform, now covers 1,480 breadcrumb items and 38 FAQ pages, all generated at build time and validated by Google with zero errors across two full validation cycles.

Migration & Cutover

94%

Content migrated in the 60-day window

926 of 983 entries before go-live; peak month December 2025 (310 publishes)

Zero downtime

Go-live on 14 January 2026

Brand-query traffic flat through the migration — no cutover cliff

Search Performance Through Migration

+18.4%

CTR improvement post-migration

3.8% → 4.5% (Google Search Console, AU-scoped)

+3.0

Average position improvement

14.7 → 11.7 across the property

Editorial Operations

159/month

Publish throughput post-launch

Three client editors managing 983 entries with no developer involvement

<10 min

Publish-to-live latency

Contentful webhook → Jenkins → S3 → CloudFront, editor-triggered

Core Web Vitals & Structured Data

Desktop CWV failures within 5 weeks

From hundreds of failing URLs to 1,447 good, 0 needs-improvement, 0 poor

1,480

Structured-data items, zero errors

Breadcrumbs, FAQ, MedicalBusiness — auto-generated at build

Key Lessons

Migration does not have to mean traffic loss

With disciplined redirect mapping and structured-data implementation, the new site achieved CTR and ranking improvements within weeks of launch — not the months of recovery often assumed for an enterprise re-platform. Brand-query traffic stayed flat through cutover.

Static architecture eliminates Core Web Vitals problems at the root

Pre-built HTML served from CDN edge locations removes the server-side rendering bottleneck that causes CLS and LCP failures. Desktop went from hundreds of failing URLs to zero in five weeks — a side-effect of the architecture, not a tuning exercise.

A lean team can manage a large content estate if the platform is right

Three editors managing 983 entries at a four-hour publish cadence — with 20.6 average revisions per entry — is not low adoption, it is operational efficiency. Contentful's editorial experience and the editor-triggered pipeline removed the developer dependency that was the real bottleneck.

"Moving from Umbraco to Contentful changed what our team can do day-to-day. Publishing used to be fiddly, and things would break. Now it's a publish button, and it's live within minutes. For a small marketing team running a national healthcare brand, that's the difference between reactive and proactive."

Michael Rothwell

Brand Manager

Australian Clinical Labs

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