Persona 01
Super Advocate.
Educated professional, already committed. Wants to pledge, petition, donate, and spread initiatives. Needs accountability: where does my money go?
Idle play
Low commitment
Mobile-first
WWF Canada
Our redesign lifted digital donations 37% and grew WWF.ca's organic traffic from 76,000 to a peak of 145,000 monthly visits.
Nonprofit
·
Enterprise
·
Website redesign
At a glance
Ten months. Four platforms.
One system.
W1
W2
W3
W4
W5
W6
W7
W8
01
Weeks 1 — 2
Audit.
A structured teardown of WWF.ca, its microsites, and the Living Planet portals, read against the documented analytics baseline and the nine user groups.
02
Weeks 3 — 4
Architecture
A full content audit fed the information architecture: a simplified two-tier navigation, sticky header, click-not-hover dropdowns, shortened page titles, and URLs aligned to H1s.
03
Weeks 5 — 7
Build
WordPress multisite, SSL, CDN, staging and local environments, bilingual configuration, and responsive front-end development across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
04
Week 8
Handoff
A modular content editing system, plus training, so internal teams could publish independently.
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TOOLS
WordPress · Google Analytics · FullStory
Designers · Strategy lead
Method
9 audits
3 personas · 1 trust architecture
Testing
20+ templates
Home · Bingo · Categories · Blog
Engagement
WCAG 2.1 AA
Accessibility standard
The Client
Canada's leading voice for wildlife and the places it lives.
MPL · Player Base
WWF-Canada is the Canadian arm of one of the world's most recognized environmental organizations, working to protect wildlife, habitats, and the ecosystems Canadians depend on across the Arctic, oceans, freshwater, and species conservation.
Its website is not a brochure. It is the front door for donors, the checkout for online and mobile giving, and the operational hub for campaigns that respond to conservation issues in real time.
Founded
Toronto, Ontario
Reach
Canada-wide, bilingual English and French
Scale
118,020 site users per quarter before the redesign
The Challenge
The site was losing people at the exact moment they decided to act.
A documented pre-redesign audit found a high-traffic site with almost no depth of engagement, and a donation funnel bleeding intent.
Problem 01
Drop-off at scale.
148,196 sessions produced roughly 121,000 drop-offs. Bounce rate sat at 69.04%, against a 40% ideal benchmark. The average visitor saw 1.88 pages and left after 1 minute 35 seconds.
Problem 02
Mobile was the weakest surface, and the fastest growing.
Mobile carried 34.7% of traffic but behaved like a different site. Bounce hit 75.40% against desktop's 65.15%. Sessions lasted 49 seconds against desktop's 1 minute 54. Mobile generated CA$7,035 in revenue over the study period. Desktop generated CA$45,906.
Problem 03
Fragmentation, all the way down.
The store microsite lost every visual connection to WWF-Canada the moment a user landed on it. The Living Planet portals ran independently. Internal teams needed a developer for routine content changes, which meant campaigns moved at engineering speed rather than conservation speed.
Problem 04
Compliance.
Every U.S. state regulates real-money gaming differently. The experience had to flex across jurisdictions, surfacing the right legal, age, and responsible-gaming requirements without burying players in fine print or blocking legitimate signups.
Problem 05
Scalability.
MPL needed a system, not a one-off page. Without a shared design language and component library, every new segment, promotion, or market would mean rebuilding from scratch. The experience had to scale as fast as the roadmap.
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Before / After
Same platform,
rebuilt for a new market.
Drag the handle to see how the experience changed, from a generic gaming site into an institution-grade platform built to earn trust with skeptical U.S. players.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
Strategy through front-end build.
01
Product strategy and UX audit across WWF.ca and its microsites
02
User research, information architecture, site map, and content map
03
Art direction, moodboards, and brand guidelines within WWF's global system
04
UI/UX design across roughly 30 page templates and the full donation funnel
05
Usability testing and a reusable design system
06
Responsive front-end development, mobile first
07
WordPress multisite build, hosting, SSL, CDN, and bilingual English and French configuration
08
WCAG accessibility built into the system rather than retrofitted
Research
A documented baseline, before anything was redesigned.
A full Website Review and Strategy, commissioned by WWF-Canada and conducted by Bits Creative Agency, established the pre-redesign baseline from Google Analytics and FullStory data across a three-month window, May 31 to August 31, 2018. WANDR carried its own UX audit and user research into the engagement and designed against that evidence rather than against opinion.
63.17%
User Research
Traffic was strong. Conversion was not.
Organic search delivered 63.17% of sessions and converted at 0.28%. Direct traffic converted at 1.21%, email at 2.80%, and social, the largest brand investment, at 0.19%. The site was excellent at being found and poor at being acted on.
5
Competitive Benchmarking
The donation page was the bottleneck, not the demand.
Donation forms were among the most-interacted destinations on the site, yet the Donate page carried an overwhelming volume of text and side links with no single message. Average order value was CA$61.16, and recurring giving was not offered as a default path.
91%
Current Website Analysis
Nine audiences, one undifferentiated experience.
Research identified nine distinct user groups arriving with materially different intents, from major-gift philanthropists to students researching monarch butterflies. All of them were served the same navigation and the same calls to action.
Nine audiences, four different asks.
Persona 02
Green Living Enthusiast.
Already active in sustainability. Wants resources, events, and a volunteer role. Weighs options before giving.
Daily session
High stakes
Trust-driven
Persona 03
Feel-Good Beginner.
New to the cause, often younger. Curious browser, animal lover, wants to look good doing good. Does not know where to start.
Social play
Peer-driven
Community-led
Persona 03
Researcher.
Peer-driven
Social play
Community-led
Student or professional hunting scientific data. Lands deep on species pages, reads long, and rarely converts on the visit.
Persona 03
Job Hunter.
Peer-driven
Social play
Community-led
Drawn by the prestige of the brand. Needs careers, leadership, and credibility signals.
Persona 03
Corporate Professional.
Peer-driven
Social play
Community-led
Decision maker evaluating sponsorship. Wants annual reports, financials, and return on investment before any conversation.
Consolidate the platform. Rebuild the moment of giving.
Hand back the keys.
Principle 01Trust
01
Unify a fragmented ecosystem.
Move WWF-Canada off ColdFusion and onto a single WordPress multisite. Bring the store microsite, campaign properties, and the three Living Planet portals under one brand-compliant system, so that a supporter's experience no longer changed depending on which door they entered through.
Principle 02Segment
02
Redesign the donation experience, mobile first.
Rebuild the funnel around how supporters actually decide. Strip distraction from the donation page, cut steps between intent and completion, surface recurring giving as a first-class option, and preselect suggested amounts anchored to the CA$61 average. Every decision was made against the mobile surface first, because that was where the money was being lost.
Principle 03Bingo
03
Build for the team that has to live with it.
Deliver a modular content system so WWF-Canada's internal team could launch campaigns, restructure pages, and respond to conservation moments without opening a developer ticket, and without breaking WWF's global brand standards.
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THE KEY INSIGHT
A conservation authority on a platform that could not carry it.
By 2018, WWF-Canada's digital presence had grown into a patchwork. The main site ran on ColdFusion. A store microsite, three separate Living Planet supporter portals, and a set of campaign properties had each been built at different times, on different systems, to different standards. Traffic was strong. Almost nothing else was.
WANDR was engaged in January 2019, with production beginning that May, to redesign and rebuild WWF.ca and its microsites as a single WordPress multisite. The engagement ran through 2020 and covered product strategy, UX audit, user research, information architecture, art direction, UI/UX design, usability testing, a design system, front-end development, and CMS integration. Every decision had to clear WWF's global brand system, shared across every international chapter.
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Outcomes
What the redesign moved.
The engagement closed with a complete handoff package: page designs across 20+ unique templates, research documentation, a trust architecture framework, a design system, and an implementation plan ordered by impact.
01 · Trust
+37%
Increase in digital donationsThrough the mobile-first funnel redesign
02 · Intent
+26%
Increase in new mobile users
03 · Speed
+18%
Increase in average time on site
04 · Clarity
4 → 1
Platforms unified into one WordPress multisite
Figures from qualitative user testing conducted during the engagement. In-market performance validation sits with MPL's internal team post-handoff.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
We've seen a lot more traffic coming to WWF.ca since the redesign… and our conversion rate on our donor forms is up thanks to Wandr's new designs.
