Case Study: Westminster Abbey achieves 60% increase in online ticket sales with Umbraco

Restructuring, redesigning and rebuilding with Umbraco

Westminster Abbey, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the UK’s top tourist attractions, needed a modern, mobile-friendly website that reflected the Abbey’s history and welcomed diverse audiences while simplifying a complex editorial workflow. The Abbey chose the Umbraco CMS for its ease of editing, open-source model and developer control, after demonstrations and recommendations showed it could resolve the confusing navigation, poor mobile experience and sprawling content left by their previous Squiz Matrix site.

The new site was rebuilt on Umbraco (implemented by Pixel to Code with design from M&C Experience Design), using Umbraco Compositions and Content Templates, reusable components, responsive image delivery, caching and a separate module for transient data, plus load testing and Azure monitoring to ensure scalability. Using Umbraco enabled an intuitive editor experience and fast pages, and delivered strong results: bounce rate down 45%, exit rate down 10%, online ticket sales up 60% (UK ticket sales +11%), UK visits up 13% and views of service times up 59%—along with industry awards for the site.

Westminster Abbey