Supporting a £6.3bn tourism economy: more sign-ups and conversions from Wales’s two national tourism sites
Welsh tourism is worth around £6.3 billion a year, and visitwales.com and wales.com are where many visitors start. Working as part of the Welsh Government’s team, Box UK used tested, evidence-led changes to raise newsletter sign-ups by 285% and conversions by 119%, without changing platform.
£6.3bn
a year: the tourism economy the sites support
285
% newsletter sign-ups
119%
conversions
2
bilingual Drupal sites improved without a replatform
In short
- The Welsh Government runs visitwales.com and wales.com on Drupal.
- It wanted more engagement, sign-ups and revenue without disrupting either site.
- Box UK’s developers, QA engineers and project manager worked inside the Welsh Government’s team.
- Every change started as a testable hypothesis, agreed with the content team.
- A new search block, a survey pop-up and editor-controlled animations each targeted a metric.
- Newsletter sign-ups rose 285% and conversions 119%, Q4 2021 to Q4 2022.
Customer Background
Welsh tourism is worth around £6.3 billion a year to the economy. Growing it depends on visitors finding the right places to stay, eat and visit, quickly, wherever they start looking.
The Welsh Government runs two flagship tourism sites, visitwales.com and wales.com, both built on Drupal and both part of the Cymru Wales brand. Its content and digital team wanted to push engagement, sign-ups and revenue higher across both, without disturbing a platform many teams relied on every day.
The Challenge
Several teams across the Cymru Wales brand publish into both sites. Each needs to add and change content freely, without any one change weakening brand consistency. The Welsh Government set that out as a requirement from the start.
Both sites also have to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards and work fully in Welsh and English. Any improvement to engagement had to keep all of that intact, not trade it away.
Our Approach
Box UK worked as part of the Welsh Government’s brand, digital and content teams. Our developers, QA engineers and project manager worked alongside them, providing support, maintenance and ongoing Drupal development across both sites. We ran the work in sprints, so the team saw defined outcomes at regular points rather than waiting for a big reveal.
To decide what to build, we used hypothesis-driven development. Each change started as a specific, testable claim about how the site would perform, based on real user behaviour. We agreed each one with the content and digital team, tested it, and let the results decide.
We also used Drupal’s strengths rather than working around them: granular editorial permissions, accessibility support in core and mature multilingual handling.
What we Built
Each piece of work was tied to a metric and built to fit Drupal’s content model.
- A new search block made relevant content easier to find.
- A survey pop-up gave the team a direct line to visitors and drove newsletter sign-ups.
- Parallax animations let editors emphasise parts of an article themselves, removing the need for a separate publishing licence and cutting cost.
Throughout, editors across several teams kept the freedom to update their own sections in both languages, while brand consistency held.
Delivery: accessibility and bilingual support on every change
Every change had to meet WCAG AA and work in both languages, with permissions set up so multiple teams could work in parallel. Testing those conditions was part of every sprint, not a check at the end.
The Outcome
Comparing Q4 2021 with Q4 2022:
- Newsletter sign-ups rose 285%, driven by the survey pop-up.
- Conversions rose 119%. Total product views fell at the same time: visitors were reaching the right page faster and acting on it.
- Search volume rose 2.5% after the new search block launched.
- Lower cost: the parallax animations removed reliance on a separate publishing licence.
For the Welsh Government, that meant more of the engagement the tourism strategy depends on, from the same two Drupal sites, with no platform change.
FAQs
Yes. On visitwales.com and wales.com, a series of tested changes on the existing Drupal platform raised conversions by 119% and newsletter sign-ups by 285% over a year.
It’s a way of deciding what to build by turning each idea into a testable prediction, such as “a search block on article pages will increase searches”, then building it, measuring it and keeping what works.
Use the CMS’s permissions to give each team control of its own sections while locking down shared templates and components. Drupal’s permissions model made this possible across both Welsh Government sites.
Test accessibility and both languages in every sprint, not at the end. On the Welsh Government sites, every change had to meet WCAG AA in Welsh and English before release.
Because visitors found what they wanted with fewer clicks. Fewer pages viewed, with more people acting, is a sign that findability improved.
What this means
for your organisation
If you run large content sites on Drupal with several teams publishing into them, the hard part is rarely one redesign. It’s improving performance continuously without losing accessibility, brand consistency or the goodwill of the people who manage the content every day.
That’s the work we do across the public sector, membership bodies and financial services, from the Welsh Government to ORX. If you want more out of an existing Drupal estate, send us a few lines about it. We’ll tell you where we think the gains are.
Talk to one of our digital experts
Tom Houdmont
Chief Technology Officer
Do you have an idea or a project you need support with?
Tom is CTO at Box UK, with 12 years’ experience helping clients deliver ambitious digital products. His background spans Solution Architecture, Front End Development and AI adoption, with particular expertise in high-traffic websites that perform reliably at scale and in embedding AI into delivery practice.
Or call us on 020 7439 1900
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