600 pages, three languages, no traffic lost.

The brief had two halves. The first was operational: move 600+ pages across three languages onto a new CMS without breaking the customer experience or losing search traffic, working with a globally distributed team. The second was performance: use the migration as a moment to tighten the personalisation, the analytics instrumentation, and the conversion funnels, and measure the lift.

The work

I led the public website work end to end — the CMS migration, the SEO continuity plan, the A/B testing programme, and the cross-functional coordination with the global HSBC digital team. A big-bang migration of 600+ pages across three languages would have been an unforced risk; phasing it let us test the new CMS on lower-traffic page types before moving the conversion-critical journeys.

The migration itself was the kind of work that doesn’t show up in case studies but determines whether everything else holds up. URL preservation, redirect maps, structured data migration, search console hygiene, language switcher behaviour, accessibility regressions. Each of those gaps, missed, would have shown up later as a traffic loss or a customer complaint. The 10% reduction in bounce rate was at least partly downstream of getting the migration mechanics right — a site that loads faster, renders cleaner, and serves the right language to the right visitor has a structurally lower bounce rate before any optimisation work begins.

Once the platform was stable, the optimisation work centred on three things. SEO continuity: retaining the search authority of the pre-migration site through careful URL planning, content parity checks, and search console monitoring. Personalisation via Adobe Target: experimenting with targeted content for known and inferred audience segments on high-traffic landing pages. Conversion funnel A/B testing: running controlled tests on the credit card and personal loan acquisition journeys, where small changes in copy, form structure, and CTA placement compound into real conversion lift at this traffic scale.

The cross-functional shape of the team mattered. The Hong Kong site had to align with HSBC’s global digital standards, which meant working with a global team on shared components, brand consistency, and infrastructure decisions, while preserving enough local autonomy to optimise for the Hong Kong customer specifically. That sat at a slightly awkward seam between the global and regional teams, and most of the operational tension during the project lived there.

What I shipped

A phased CMS migration covering 600+ public website pages across three languages. An SEO continuity plan that protected search traffic through the platform transition. A personalisation programme using Adobe Target on high-traffic landing pages. An A/B testing operation using Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, focused on credit card and personal loan acquisition funnels. A working relationship between the Hong Kong site work and the global HSBC digital team that kept brand consistency without sacrificing local optimisation.

Outcomes

10% reduction in bounce rate across the migrated site. Credit card and personal loan conversion lift through A/B testing on the acquisition funnels. 600K mobile app installs and 4M monthly active users on the platform during the tenure. 600+ pages migrated across 3 languages with SEO continuity.

What I’d tell someone doing this now

A CMS migration is mostly a continuity exercise, and continuity is invisible when it works. If you get the migration right, no one outside the project will know it happened. If you get it wrong, every stakeholder will know within a week, because traffic will drop or a marketing campaign will land on a broken redirect. The case study version of this work tends to focus on the optimisation outcomes — the A/B testing, the conversion lift, the bounce rate reduction — but the operational discipline that protects search traffic and customer flow through the migration is the actual foundation. Underinvest in that and the optimisation work has nothing to optimise.

On A/B testing at scale: Adobe Target makes it tempting to run a lot of small experiments simultaneously. At HSBC’s traffic volumes, you can power tests on quite small effect sizes, which means you can detect lifts that are statistically real but operationally trivial. The discipline is to focus the testing programme on the small number of journeys that actually move the business — credit card acquisition, personal loan acquisition — and to resist the urge to test every copy variant on every page.

On the global / local seam: the global team optimises for consistency; the regional team optimises for local performance. Both are right. The work is to find the small set of decisions where consistency really matters — brand, security posture, core component behaviour — and the larger set where local optimisation is correct, and to keep those buckets clearly separated so that every disagreement doesn’t have to be a debate about the entire operating model.

Tech stack