Acuiti Website Development and Modernisation

Client Overview

• Client Name: Acuiti
• Industry: Capital Markets Intelligence (Derivatives)
• Website URL: acuiti.io

Acuiti provides management intelligence for the derivatives markets. Through its member networks it publishes quarterly trend reports, operational and salary benchmarks, and runs exclusive forums for senior executives across the global capital markets industry. Data capture sits at the heart of the business, so the website is not a brochure, it is an operational tool the team relies on every day.

Challenge

Acuiti already had an established WordPress website doing real work. This was not a rescue project or a ground-up rebuild. What they needed was a developer who could get into the existing codebase, add new features, and modernise the site over time, without disrupting a platform the business depends on.

That means working carefully within someone else’s build: understanding how it fits together, extending it cleanly, and improving it in place rather than tearing it down. The work is ongoing and varied, from adding functionality and tidying up the underlying code to larger set-piece projects. It also meant putting the right groundwork in place, including a safe, repeatable way to deploy changes to a live, business-critical site.

The biggest of those so far was a whole-site forms migration to HubSpot. The forms are the site’s main source of leads and data, so every one of them, across event pages, report downloads, sign-up journeys, and the individual expert-network pages, had to move to HubSpot without dropping submissions or breaking pages. Acuiti also wanted to know which page each submission came from, something the old setup did not reliably capture. On top of that, keeping report pages current meant manually copying form IDs and file values across from HubSpot by hand, which was fiddly and easy to get wrong.

Project Goals

• Work within Acuiti’s existing WordPress codebase to add features and modernise the site.
• Extend and improve the build in place, without disrupting a live, business-critical platform.
• Set up a reliable way to deploy changes across dev, staging, and production, with backups.
• Migrate every form on the site from the old system to HubSpot, with no lost submissions or broken pages.
• Capture the originating page for each submission and sync it back to HubSpot.
• Make it easy for website managers to add forms to report pages, without manual copy-paste.
• Make new and migrated components sit cleanly within Acuiti’s branding.
• Handle updates and new development on an ad-hoc basis as needs come up.

Process and Development

1. Getting into the codebase: Took the time to understand the existing WordPress build so new work could extend it cleanly rather than fight it.
2. Ongoing feature work and modernisation: Added functionality and modernised parts of the site incrementally, improving it in place while keeping the live platform stable.
3. Deployment workflow: Built a custom deployment workflow across WP Engine and GitHub so changes move cleanly through dev, staging, and production, with full backups, giving a safe, repeatable way to ship work to a live site.
4. Custom form embed: As part of the HubSpot project, built a custom shortcode to drop the correct HubSpot form into any page by ID, keeping the embed consistent and reusable for the team.
5. HubSpot API integration with search: Built a direct HubSpot API integration into the WordPress admin so website managers can search their HubSpot forms and add the right one to a report page in a couple of clicks, rather than tracking down and copy-pasting form IDs and values by hand. This was a big win for the team’s day-to-day work.
6. Conversion-page capture: Wrote the code so each submission records the page it came from and passes that value through to HubSpot, giving the team clean per-page conversion data.
7. Site-wide rollout: Worked through the event pages, report downloads, sign-up pages, and expert-network pages, swapping each form over and confirming the data flowed correctly.
8. Presentation and styling: Sat the embedded HubSpot forms on clean panels so they read clearly within Acuiti’s branding, working around the constraints of HubSpot’s locked form iframe.
9. Scheduled go-live: Built the forms migration on staging, tested it, then ran it into the live site at the agreed time and confirmed everything worked end to end.
10. Ad-hoc support: Continued handling updates, tweaks, and new development as and when Acuiti needs it.

Solutions Delivered

• Ongoing development inside Acuiti’s existing WordPress codebase, adding features and modernising the site over time.
• A custom deployment workflow across WP Engine and GitHub, moving changes cleanly through dev, staging, and production with full backups.
• A whole-site forms migration to HubSpot, from events and report downloads to sign-ups and expert-network pages.
• A reusable custom shortcode for embedding HubSpot forms by ID.
• A direct HubSpot API integration with search, so website managers can add forms to report pages without copy-pasting IDs.
• Per-page conversion tracking that syncs the originating page back to HubSpot.
• Cleanly presented components that fit the site’s branding.
• Updates and new development handled ad-hoc as needs come up.

Results

• Acuiti has a developer who works within the existing site to add features and modernise it, without the cost and risk of a rebuild.
• Changes now move through dev, staging, and production on a clean, backed-up pipeline, so updates ship with far less risk to a live, business-critical site.
• The entire form estate moved to HubSpot while the site stayed live and its data capture stayed intact.
• The team can now see which page each submission came from, giving them a clearer view of what converts.
• The custom embed makes adding and updating forms straightforward for the team, without a developer for every change.
• Adding a form to a report page is now a quick search-and-select through the HubSpot API integration, cutting out the manual copy-paste and the errors that came with it.
• A complex, interdependent migration landed on its planned go-live date, alongside the ad-hoc development work as it comes up.

Conclusion

The Acuiti engagement is ongoing WordPress development on an established, business-critical site: getting into the existing codebase, adding new features, and modernising the site in place, from a custom WP Engine and GitHub deployment workflow to a HubSpot API integration that removes manual copy-paste. The whole-site HubSpot forms migration, delivered on staging, tested, and taken live on schedule, is one significant piece of that wider work, and WildPress continues to develop the site on an ad-hoc basis as new work comes up.

Client testimonial

Just wanted to send a huge appreciation for your work on this project. You've been super efficient and just got on, and what has been a hugely complicated project has really been made much easier with your expertise.

The code you've added on the site also works brilliantly and is very easy for me to figure out how to change.

Olivia Bray, COO, Acuiti