Digital Transformation Elevates Steel City’s Online Experience

OVERVIEW

Steel City is a leading provider of branded merchandise, helping businesses across the UK source, customise, and deliver high-quality promotional products. With a strong reputation for service, reliability, and product range, Steel City had built a loyal customer base and a well-established presence in the market.

As the business continued to grow, there was an opportunity to evolve their digital platform to better reflect their capabilities, improve performance, and support a more streamlined customer journey. The ambition was clear: to create a fast, scalable, and lead-generating website that made it easier for users to explore products and submit enquiries, while giving the internal team greater flexibility and control.

To achieve this, Steel City partnered with Hydra Creative to design and build a bespoke website that would act as a central hub for product discovery, enquiry generation, and ongoing marketing activity.

Steel City Digital Transformation | Hydra Creative

The Challenge

While Steel City’s existing website had supported the business to date, it was beginning to show its limitations as the company scaled.

The platform struggled to keep pace with the size and complexity of the product catalogue, making it difficult for users to navigate efficiently or fully understand the breadth of offering. Product variations, particularly around branding methods, were fragmented across multiple listings, creating unnecessary friction in the user journey.

The enquiry process also lacked structure. Users didn’t have a clear or consistent way to build a selection of products and submit a single, cohesive request, which added steps to the process and risked drop-off at key conversion points.

From an operational perspective, managing products and content updates was becoming increasingly time-consuming. With limited automation and scalability, the system required more manual input than ideal, making it harder for the team to keep the site as dynamic and responsive as the business itself.

Performance was another key consideration. Page speed and overall responsiveness had room for improvement, particularly as user expectations continued to rise and search engines placed greater emphasis on technical performance.

Steel City didn’t need a complete re-invention, but they did need a platform that could match the pace of their growth, streamline the user journey, and unlock the full potential of their digital presence.

A pair of hands holding a phone displaying the Steel City Website against an orange background.

A laptop on a desk displaying the Steel City Website against a blue background.

What We Did

Hydra Creative delivered a bespoke WordPress website powered by WooCommerce, reconfigured into a fully non-transactional, quote-driven platform tailored to Steel City’s business model.

We restructured the product experience to make browsing more intuitive, consolidating product variations into unified listings. This allows users to select branding options, quantities, and specifications within a single page, simplifying the journey and improving clarity.

To support the scale of Steel City’s offering, we implemented a custom-built product import system, enabling efficient onboarding and management of large product datasets through automated feeds and a dedicated staging environment. This gives the team greater control while significantly reducing manual effort.

We also transformed the way enquiries are handled by repurposing WooCommerce functionality into a quote basket system. Users can now browse, shortlist products, and submit structured quote requests through a streamlined process that aligns with Steel City’s sales approach.

Advanced filtering and search functionality were introduced, allowing users to quickly refine results based on key attributes such as price, delivery time, and branding options. This ensures a smooth and efficient browsing experience across a large and diverse product catalogue.

Alongside this, we enhanced the site’s content and marketing capabilities with a fully integrated blog and Knowledge Hub, supporting SEO management and providing valuable resources for customers. Dynamic homepage elements, including trending products, featured content, customer logos, and Google reviews, help reinforce credibility and keep the site fresh.

Performance optimisation was a key focus throughout the build. The site is fully responsive, mobile-first, and designed with modern performance standards in mind, including automated image optimisation and clean, efficient architecture.

Multiple enquiry touchpoints, including quick quote forms, wish list functionality, and live chat, were introduced to ensure users can engage with the Steel City team in a way that suits them best.

The new Steel City website has delivered a significant uplift in both performance and user experience (UX).

Page load times have decreased by nearly two seconds, creating a faster, more responsive platform that better meets user expectations. This has contributed to a 50% increase in website visits, month on month, since launch, reflecting improved visibility and engagement.

Users can now explore products more easily, filter options efficiently, and submit detailed quote requests with minimal friction. The enhanced structure and enquiry process provide a smoother, more intuitive journey from initial browsing through to conversion.

Internally, the Steel City team now benefits from a scalable, flexible platform that supports efficient product management, ongoing content updates, and long-term SEO growth.

Overall, the new website builds on Steel City’s strong foundations, providing a modern, high-performing digital platform that supports both their current operations and future ambitions.