Case Study: Allen & Unwin (book publisher) achieves 20% sales uplift and an award‑winning, faster e‑commerce site with Butterfly

Allen & Unwin - Customer Case Study

Allen & Unwin, a major book publisher, faced a failing bespoke CMS that was slow, unstable and hard to extend—causing abandoned shopping baskets, a poor mobile experience and long content load times. They engaged Butterfly to overhaul the site, with a migration to an established open-source CMS (Joomla) and a redesign to better connect readers with the books they’d love.

Butterfly implemented a UX and visual refresh (bold mosaic book tiles), tightened URLs for SEO, added e‑commerce via VirtueMart with a custom payment extension, and optimized huge data sets using MySQL indexes and Sphinx search. Butterfly also gave Allen & Unwin admin tools that balance automation and control and duplicated the build for sister publisher Murdoch Books. The relaunch won a design award and delivered a 20% upturn in sales in the first two months, with noticeably happier customers.

Allen & Unwin

Jessica Post

Website Manager