Highwire: Marketing Site

I developed Highwire’s new marketing site to be SEO-friendly, CMS-powered, and fast, with a perfect Lighthouse score.

Overview

Highwire is a SaaS platform for contractor risk management, with clients like Google, Intel, and Harvard. The marketing site is our public-facing space to show off our brand, share our expertise, and convert visitors into leads.

Our old site was built on WordPress, but it was hard to manage, inflexible, and felt out of date. The marketing and executive teams wanted something modern, fully customizable, easy to maintain, and optimized for SEO.

Role

Engineer

Team

Design, Marketing, and Stakeholders

Timeline

2-3 months

The Problem

Our old marketing site had several key issues:

  • Poor SEO: slow page loads, low Lighthouse scores
  • Hard to maintain: No developers were familiar with WordPress
  • Limited customization: couldn't easily showcase new initiatives

Research & Planning

Together we analyzed the old site to:

  • Identify redundant or outdated content
  • Review Google Analytics for top-performing pages and drop-offs
  • Map out the new information architecture

I worked with the designer to:

  • Leverage Tailwind Plus for ideation
  • Create a core set of reusable content sections

Tech Stack

  • Angular for development
  • Strapi as the headless CMS to power content
  • Tailwind for styling

Building the Site

I rebuilt the marketing site from scratch using Angular SSR for speed and SEO. Everything was hooked up to Strapi so the marketing team could manage content on their own — no dev needed.

  • Built 15+ modular section components that could be mixed and matched to build new pages
  • Dynamic routing powered by the CMS (custom slugs, 404s, the works)
  • Integrated HubSpot forms and added support for page-level SEO metadata
  • Focused on clean, accessible HTML and mobile-first responsive styles
  • Made sure everything followed brand guidelines while staying flexible for future content

The result: a fast, fully CMS-driven site that looked great, scaled well, and let marketing move faster without waiting on engineering.

Results

Highwire Marketing Site
Highwire Marketing Site
Highwire Marketing Site
Highwire Marketing Site
Highwire Marketing Site

Focus on Performance & SEO

One of my main goals was a perfect Lighthouse score on desktop.
This required many small, careful optimizations:

  • Image optimization with WebP exports in multiple sizes, served responsively
  • Minimizing CSS bundle size (e.g., tree-shaking unused Font Awesome icons)
  • Lazy-loading images and non-critical resources
  • Adding structured data (JSON-LD), meta tags, and sitemap for SEO
  • Optimizing Angular change detection with Signals
  • Managing and minimizing 3rd-party scripts
Highwire Marketing Site

There wasn’t one big fix—it was about many tiny improvements adding up over time.

Challenges

  • Balancing performance goals with needs for 3rd party scripts (Vimeo embeds, Google Analytics, HubSpot)
  • Managing trade-offs on mobile performance: Desktop hit 100, but mobile stayed just shy due to unavoidable scripts
  • Communicating progress clearly—I learned to give frequent updates instead of disappearing into development

Results & Impact

✅ Fully custom marketing site launched
✅ 100% Lighthouse score on desktop
✅ Significantly improved SEO rankings over time
✅ Empowered marketing team to build pages without dev help
✅ Faster development cycles for future updates

What I Learned

  • The power of incremental optimization: many small wins add up
  • The importance of clear, frequent communication with stakeholders
  • How critical CMS design is for long-term scalability and usability