Rebuilding The Royal Corps of Signals
Overview
We rebuilt royalsignals.org, the official website of the Royal Corps of Signals and The Royal Signals Charity, moving more than a decade of news, events, branch listings and archive publications from an ageing self-hosted server onto a fast, secure and editor-friendly Webflow platform. Jolly Good Web has looked after royalsignals.org since April 2023. Over three years we refined the content architecture and tightened the editorial workflow. But the site had reached the limits of what its platform could offer. This rebuild gave the Corps a website that reflects where it stands today, and a foundation the team can grow without calling a developer every time.
Client: HQ Royal Signals / The Royal Signals Charity
Sector: Military, charity and veterans' association
Platform: Webflow (migrated from a self-hosted VPS)
Services: Discovery and audit, information architecture, UX, design, Webflow development, content migration, SEO redirects, QA, training
Content migrated: 2,000+ CMS items across 12 collections
Launch: 30th September 2026
The Challenge
royalsignals.org serves a wide audience: serving soldiers, veterans, families, Royal Signals Association branches across the country, charity supporters and the Royal Signals Institution. Behind it sits a small editorial team juggling news, events, journals and member resources for several organisations at once. The existing site ran on a self-hosted VPS with a custom Laravel CMS. That meant constant overhead: server management, security patching and maintenance windows, all of which took time away from the Corps' actual priorities. Every new section or layout change needed a development request. And after years of publishing, the content itself had accumulated legacy problems that would have to be untangled rather than carried forward. The brief was clear. Rebuild the site like-for-like with no loss of functionality, move it onto managed infrastructure, and give the editorial team a CMS they could work in confidently from day one.
Our approach
We ran the project in clear phases, each with a sign-off point before the next began, so the Royal Signals team had full visibility throughout.
- Discovery and audit. A full technical audit of the existing site: every page template, content type, integration and document. This became the baseline for everything that followed.
- Information architecture. We agreed the new sitemap with the client using their own navigation as the ground truth, rationalising structure rather than simply copying it.
- UX and wireframes. Key templates were wireframed for desktop and mobile and signed off before any visual design began.
- Design in Figma. Visual directions were developed collaboratively, with full client access to the Figma files throughout.
- Build and CMS setup. Approved designs became a responsive Webflow site built on a modular design system, with a CMS structured around how each editorial team actually works.
- Migration, QA and launch. Content migration, redirect mapping and a rigorous QA process, followed by a managed launch, training and handover.
The timeline was planned around the Army's calendar, with the content migration window aligned to the August leave period to minimise disruption to the editorial team.
The Migration: Moving a Decade of Content Without Losing a Thing
The biggest job was the content. The old site held years of news, event listings, branch information and decades of archive publications, and all of it needed to arrive intact.
Auditing everything first: We crawled more than 8,000 URLs on the live site to build a complete inventory, then checked every collection on the new site against it so nothing slipped through the gaps.
Rescuing files from the old server: Many older news articles linked to documents stored directly on the VPS, which would disappear once it was switched off. We tracked these down, moved them to a dedicated content delivery network and updated every link.
Cleaning up legacy links: Years of copy-and-paste publishing had left disguised email safelinks and wrapped gateway links buried in article text. We found them, restored the original destinations and verified each one.
Protecting search rankings: A full 301 redirect map ensures that old URLs, bookmarks and search results still lead visitors to the right place on the new site.
Design, Accessibility and The Editor Experience
The new site is mobile-first and designed to WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards from the outset, so veterans, families and serving personnel can find what they need on any device.
Rather than a set of fixed page templates, we built a library of flexible sections. The team can now create new pages and landing sections themselves, without raising a development request. The Corps, the Association and the Charity each publish their own content. The CMS gives each team a clearly defined space to work in, so editors stay in their own lanes without risk of changing something elsewhere on the site.
Moving to Webflow's managed hosting removed the server maintenance burden entirely. The site now benefits from SOC 2 Type II certified infrastructure, DDoS protection, automatic backups, SSL and global CDN delivery, all as standard. We produced a custom guide against the new site itself, backed by hands-on workshops, so current and future editors can get up to speed quickly.
The Result
royalsignals.org is now a modern, accessible and secure website that the Royal Signals team fully owns and can manage with confidence. Every piece of existing content made the journey, old links still work, and the operational burden of running the site is materially lower than before.
- No server to patch, maintain or worry about
- 2,000+ items of content migrated and verified across 12 collections
- Old URLs preserved through redirect rules
- Editors adding pages and sections without developer involvement
From the Client:
Working with the Jolly Good Web team to rebuild our Corps website has been an exceptional experience. They provided a variety of design concepts and navigated our extensive feedback seamlessly, ensuring every detail was exactly what we wanted. The final website is sleek, clear, and modern, a huge upgrade that delivers a much better user experience. They kept to all our timelines throughout the project with the new website going live on the expected date. - Stephanie Hamlett, SO3 Digital Communication and Publications
Planning a Rebuild?
If your website has outgrown its platform, or your team is spending more time maintaining it than using it, we'd love to talk. Jolly Good Web is a Webflow Certified Partner, and we specialise in careful, complete migrations that leave nothing behind.
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