In early 2024, I led the complete redesign and rebuild of the King Price Insurance website. I’m not talking about a facelift. I’m talking about ripping out a 12-year-old legacy system, assembling a new dev team, getting CEO sign-off on a new brand direction, building a new back-end architecture, implementing a full SEO strategy, and launching the whole thing in six months.

The results? Over 600 additional leads per month compared to previous years. Conversion rates up across the board. And 90,000+ organic visits through blog content in the first eight months.

Here’s what I learned.

Don’t touch a single pixel until you understand the data

Before we designed anything, I went through two years of heatmaps, analytics, and user behaviour data. Not a quick scroll through Google Analytics. A proper, systematic review of where people were clicking, where they were bouncing, where the quote flows were losing them, and how the mobile experience was performing.

King Price sells car insurance, home insurance, buildings cover, business insurance, life insurance, and specialist products. That’s a complex product ecosystem. The old site had grown organically for over a decade, which meant the navigation was messy, the product pages were inconsistent, and the quote journey had friction at almost every step.

The data showed us exactly what was broken. We didn’t guess. We measured first and designed second. If you’re doing it the other way around, you’re gambling with your client’s money.

Get CEO buy-in before you start

I presented the new direction to the King Price CEO and got sign-off before we started building. That one step removed about 90% of the political friction that kills redesign projects.

When the CEO has seen and approved the direction, every stakeholder meeting after that moves faster. People stop debating whether the button should be green or blue because the strategic direction has already been decided at the top. If you’re sitting on a redesign project and you haven’t got executive alignment, stop everything and go get it. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the single most important step in the entire process.

Sometimes you have to scrap the whole thing

The old King Price platform had been running since the company launched in 2012. Twelve years of patches, workarounds, and inherited tech debt. Simple updates took days. A/B testing was impossible. And the system couldn’t talk properly to the lead management platform.

I worked with IT to put together a dedicated web dev team and we built a brand-new back-end from scratch. Purpose-built for fast deployments, seamless lead integration, and continuous testing. The old platform was fully switched off. We didn’t try to save it. We replaced it.

That sounds dramatic, but sometimes patching a legacy system costs more in the long run than building a new one properly. The 12-year-old system was holding King Price back. The new one set them free.

Brand direction goes deeper than the website

I spearheaded the new branding direction for King Price’s digital presence. Fresh, modern, clean. But the work didn’t stop at the website. I designed a new custom icon set that was rolled out across the entire company. When you’re serious about brand, you build a system that works everywhere, not just one touchpoint.

Build SEO into the foundations, not the afterthought pile

Most redesign projects treat SEO as something you bolt on after launch. We built it into the platform architecture from day one. Technical foundations, content architecture, heading hierarchy, internal linking, and a blog-to-product funnel designed to pull in people searching for insurance information and guide them toward a quote.

That architecture drove over 90,000 organic visits through blog content in eight months. Real people searching for real insurance questions, landing on King Price’s blog, and flowing into product pages. That’s not traffic for vanity metrics. That’s organic lead generation baked into the bones of the site.

A website is a product, not a project

One of the biggest wins from the rebuild: full A/B testing on any page. The old system couldn’t do this. The new architecture was designed so every flow can be tested, measured, and improved on an ongoing basis.

A website isn’t something you launch and walk away from. It’s something that should get better every month. If your platform doesn’t support that, it’s already holding you back.

The takeaway

If your insurance website was built more than five years ago, the question isn’t whether you need a redesign. It’s how much revenue you’re losing every month by not doing one.

King Price went from a legacy system to a modern, high-converting platform in six months. 600+ additional leads per month. 90,000+ organic visits. A/B testing on everything. And a brand direction that finally matches the ambition of the company.

That’s what happens when you lead with data, build with discipline, and don’t try to save a system that’s past saving.

Want to chat about your project? Drop me a mail at hello@rademanstudios.co.za or call (+27) 082 783 1380. I reply personally. No bots.