Unilife

The Challenge

Unilife were growing, but their website wasn’t keeping up. The issues were affecting operations, marketing, and ultimately, revenue.

• Extremely Difficult for the Team to Use: The old site made updating content painful. Adding new locations, which is an essential task for a rapidly expanding accommodation provider, was slow, inconsistent, and dependency heavy.
• Poor Technical Performance: Load times were slow across devices, creating friction for students and reducing the site’s visibility in search engines.
• Outdated, Off Brand Design: Unilife had invested heavily in their visual identity, but the website didn’t reflect this. The look and feel felt tired, inconsistent, and misaligned with the brand they had become.
• Inconsistent and Ineffective Support: Their previous developers struggled to deliver timely fixes or reliable support, leaving the Unilife team without confidence or clarity.
• Low User Engagement: Students found the site hard to navigate, which negatively affected enquiry and booking performance at a time when conversions mattered most.
• No PPC Conversion Tracking: Paid campaigns were running blind. Without accurate tracking, it was nearly impossible to measure ROI or allocate budget effectively.
• Bing Search Visibility Issues: Historical hacking incidents meant Unilife’s domain was partially blocked on Bing, restricting visibility. We helped resolve and remove this block as part of the support process.

The Solution

First, we held an in-depth discovery phase to get under the skin of Unilife, their business goals and strategies, key audiences, tech stack and more, to allow our teams to unearth all of the real challenges, not just the ones we already knew about.

Following that, we took all of the insights we gathered and produced a discovery output for Unilife that outlined our proposed approach to the project. We quickly got the green light to go ahead with our recommendations and so, we got underway.

Our approach was a complete, fundamentals-first rebuild, driven by data, user needs, brand alignment, and operational efficiency. Some of the highlights of the build were:

• A New Website Built for Growth: We shifted away from the old, restrictive CMS and rebuilt the entire site in WordPress with a far more flexible content architecture, allowing Unilife to easily add and manage locations as the business expands. This removed friction, saved internal time, and eliminated dependency on external developers for core updates, allowing the internal marketing teams to move quicker and with more control.
• Vastly Improved Technical Performance: Through best practice development including image optimisation, lightweight components, and performance focused coding, we delivered a site that loads quickly across all devices, supporting SEO and improving user experience.
• An On Brand Design System: Alongside Unilife’s bigger brand refresh, we developed and implemented the new guidelines into a digital design system that aligns with Unilife’s new identity, which is visually consistent across the site, provides template modules & pages, and replicable calls-to-action.
• Built for International Reach & Accessibility: To support Unilife’s international audience, we integrated Weglot to enable fast, accurate translations across key languages, including Mandarin (ZH), Hindi, and Spanish. Weglot ensures the site can automatically detect, translate, and serve multilingual content while preserving SEO integrity and user experience. We also implemented UserWay to strengthen accessibility across the website, providing tools such as screen reader support, colour contrast adjustments, and keyboard navigation improvements, ensuring the site is inclusive and usable for all visitors.
• A Support Partnership that Actually Works: Unilife now benefits from reliable, predictable support with clear SLAs and proactive recommendations from Hewitt Matthews. One of the early wins during support was resolving an incorrect and historic block which was placed on the Unilife URL by Bing, restoring some much needed visibility in search.
• Designed for Student Engagement and Conversions: Based on device & user data, it was decided that the new website should be intentionally designed with a mobile-first approach. As a result, the site & structure are intuitively built for students browsing accommodation options on their phones. This includes a totally new & improved navigation, clearer information hierarchy, and stronger, ‘tap-friendly’ UI for CTAs to  help increase conversions.
• Full PPC Conversion Tracking Setup: We implemented proper tracking across enquiry forms, calls, and booking journeys, giving the team complete visibility over what campaigns and keywords drive results, allowing them to make quicker and more accurate decisions regarding marketing investments going forward.

The Impact

Seven months after launch (1 April 2025), the new site is delivering strong performance uplift across key metrics.

The GA4 snapshot below highlights notable improvements in user growth and channel performance.

Key Highlights

Based on a comparison of seven months pre-launch to the seven months post-launch.

• Active users increased to 39K, up 23.4%
• New users reached 37K, up 20.5%
• Engagement time improved to 1m 10s, up 9.6%
• Organic Search traffic grew by 65.7%, showing the benefit of performance and structural improvements
• Referral traffic surged by 129.7%, indicating improved credibility and more external visibility
• Display traffic rose by 491%, supported by correct tracking and improved landing experiences

This uplift demonstrates strong improvements in visibility, engagement, and conversion potential across all channels (conversion tracking wasn’t clear enough to get a benchmark pre-launch).

Conclusion

Unilife now has a digital platform designed for the long term growth they’re aiming for. The new website is faster, easier to manage, fully on brand, and built with students at the centre. With reliable support and full tracking in place too, the team can scale confidently and make data driven decisions.

The result is a modern, high performing website that reflects Unilife’s position as a premium student accommodation provider and supports every part of their marketing and operational strategy moving forward.