Optimizely Cengage: Cybersecurity Educating Platform

NIX upgraded and migrated the Infosec website to a new CMS, optimizing and expanding its marketing capabilities and driving business growth.

Business Domain

Marketing & Advertising, Education
Service

Web Development, Digital Marketing, SEO
Technologies

.NET, HTML, SCSS, Azure, ASP.NET

Business Overview

Our client—Infosec Institute, a leading cybersecurity education provider and part of Cengage Group—specializes in providing role-based cybersecurity training for all areas of the workforce. They upskill and retrain cybersecurity professionals, preparing them for in-demand certifications from CompTIA, ISACA, ISC2, AWS, Cisco, Microsoft and more. They also help organizations empower employees at all levels to be cyber-safe at work and home through security awareness training.

Infosec’s marketing platform, built on WordPress CMS, needed to be updated. Additionally, the company operated across two websites that they decided to consolidate under one portal to strengthen brand cohesion.

The client engaged NIX to support their strategic objectives. They leveraged our longstanding partnership and proven expertise in addressing complex software challenges to significantly enhance Infosec’s website.

Project Scope

After a thorough analysis of the project, we identified four key milestones that aligned with Infosec’s goals:

Optimization of the existing platform. This involved enhancing performance and ensuring stability on the WordPress CMS.

Migration to Optimizely CMS. This phase focused on transitioning Infosec’s website and materials to the new Optimizely CMS, ensuring a smooth, disruption-free user experience.

Domain unification. Due to the existence of the main product website and subdomain dedicated to additional blogs and free resources, we needed to merge them both seamlessly under one website, ensuring no significant loss of traffic during the transition.

SEO improvements. After consolidating the two domains, our team decided to assist in maintaining and enhancing the SEO metrics of the client’s website.

Challenge

After enhancing and optimizing the WordPress website and developing a custom page design featuring Infosec’s award-winning content, we faced the platform’s limitations. The growing demands of the Infosec team—particularly in marketing tools—exceeded WordPress’s capabilities. Since WordPress is primarily a blog platform, the client needed a more robust marketing system with unlimited resources. Therefore, after a thorough analysis and consultations, we offered the client a strategic transition to Optimizely CMS.

Additionally, the client’s databases contained 20 years of content—some no longer in use—causing slow response times. This required extensive cleanup and optimization to enhance performance and ensure a smooth migration process.

Solution

Migration to Optimizely CMS

Our team fostered smooth collaboration between various contractor teams involved in the project, successfully migrating the Infosec website from WordPress to Optimizely CMS. In order to seamlessly align with Optimizely architecture, NIX’s developers continued back-end development even after the migration.

Furthermore, we were responsible for implementing best QA practices, checking the metrics, and releasing builds to provide continuous progress in quality control.

Domain Unification

By combining both websites, the team aimed to accomplish the following:

Enhanced customer experience: Unifying all resources under the main domain to ensure a consistent user experience.
Strengthening brand awareness: Creating a cohesive and solid brand identity.

Our digital marketing experts started with a comprehensive evaluation of the subdomain, analyzing traffic, SEO rankings, URL structure, and content. We then transferred all subdomain pages to the primary website and implemented redirects to ensure smooth transitions to the corresponding pages.

The next step was to update the sitemap and internal links to reflect changes in the main website. The final touches were testing the functionality of the unified portal and launching an email campaign to notify users of the updates.

SEO Improvements

While optimizing the WordPress platform, we eliminated full-page reloads by introducing partial rendering, which improved SEO metrics and sped up overall page load times. Later, by migrating to Optimizely CMS, our team aimed to reduce the performance gap between the primary and subdomain leads and boost website visibility.

During the portal unification, we mitigated the risks of losing traffic by thoroughly testing redirects before launch and closely monitoring traffic post-migration. URL changes could also have affected search engine rankings, but our team preserved the URL structure, properly configured redirects, and updated content. Additionally, we engaged a technical support team to monitor and prevent potential technical issues.

Outcome

The migration of Infosec’s website to Optimizely CMS enabled them to gain a clear, unified marketing pipeline accessible to the entire team. The client could finally run high-quality A/B tests, seamlessly share materials, and gain access to a high-quality digital marketing toolset.

As a result of merging websites, our team achieved the following:

The client’s website organic traffic significantly increased and search engine rankings improved, leading to revenue growth.
User experience was enhanced by eliminating the confusion caused by navigating between two separate websites.
We conducted competitor-based content analysis, which informed strategic improvements to the future structure of the client’s pages.

We also successfully delivered six Optimizely post-migration updates without critical bugs and strengthened the client’s team by introducing a backup engineer, ensuring stability and support for future development efforts.