Agria Pet Insurance achieves 29% sales growth with web overhaul

The need to modernize

Their website, built on an outdated AngularJs framework and Umbraco 7 CMS, was struggling to keep up with modern demands. With poor performance and the impending sunset of Umbraco 7, it was time for a bold step forward.

Agria sought a scalable, high-performance website that could meet its ambitious growth targets while matching its company values – including remaining a Carbon Positive company - and delivering an exceptional user experience.

Teaching an old dog, new tricks

Agria began its journey with a proof-of-concept rebuild of its equine insurance solution. Partnering with Fresh Egg, a web development agency, the teams looked toward migrating from a single monolithic web architecture to a headless and composable one.

This move has significantly enhanced Agria’s web development capabilities, allowing for greater modularity and reusability across their projects. A centralized design system now powers over 30 production sites, including comprehensive quote and buy journeys. This system ensures a consistent user experience and streamlined development process.

The new architecture also supports composable solutions for affiliates such as Lloyds Bank, Kennel Club, GCCF, and BASC. By utilizing Gatsby’s theme shadowing, Agria efficiently customizes the core features to meet specific site requirements while maintaining a unified codebase.

The new solution provided:

• Modern design and architecture: A headless CMS built on Umbraco with Gatsby powering the front end, offering speed, flexibility, and scalability.
• Enhanced user experience: A simplified site structure, new design system, and improved product pages featuring prominent calls to action.
• Sustainable performance: Leveraging a static-first architecture and Netlify’s global Content Delivery Network (CDN), Agria achieved a 59% reduction in carbon emissions.
• Scalability: A platform ready to support additional partner websites and multi-site setups.

Optimizing with a global edge network

For Fresh Egg, Netlify played a pivotal role in this transformation. Its Gatsby support allowed Agria to deploy pre-rendered static content through a global edge network, ensuring users experienced fast load times and optimized performance. Netlify’s serverless infrastructure also helped minimize idle server usage, reducing energy consumption and operational costs.

Features like the Netlify Image CDN optimized image delivery in modern formats like AVIF and WebP, enhanced speed, and lowered data transfer requirements. The result was a faster, more engaging, and efficient experience for users leading to meaningful upside for the business.

Innovating since 1890

Agria Pet Insurance’s web transformation shows the power of strategic, forward-thinking web development. By embracing change and continuously innovating, this 130-year-old company has achieved remarkable results across sales, engagement, conversion rates, organic traffic, and environmental impact. The impact of the site update is evident:

• 29% uplift in sales: A direct result of better performance and user experience.
• 25% higher mobile engagement: Thanks to a mobile-first approach.
• 82% quote-to-sale conversion rate: Setting a benchmark in the pet insurance sector.
• 26% growth in organic search traffic: SEO-led design drove visibility and traffic.
• 59% reduction in CO2: The equivalent of a 215km monthly car journey.

Agria and Fresh Egg’s work serves as an inspiration for businesses of all ages, demonstrating that a willingness to adapt and evolve–with the right infrastructure to support it–is essential for long-term success. As Agria Pet Insurance continues to innovate and grow, its web transformation will serve as a solid foundation.