Mutual Mortgage

About the project

Mutual of Omaha Mortgage is a national mortgage lender whose website serves borrowers and its network of loan officers and branches. As the UX Designer, I contributed significantly to the new site design, working with the brand manager. I also contributed to front-end development, content migration, tracking, and launch.

What wasn't working

The team had decided to migrate before I came on board. Their main pain points were editing pages in Umbraco and a design that needed a total overhaul. WordPress skills are also easier to find than Umbraco skills, and the team already had some familiarity with it.

The approach

We rebuilt the site on WordPress with custom plugins and a complete redesign in Figma. We used GeneratePress, a lightweight and highly customizable theme, which let us carry our design system over one-to-one.

How it came together

• Audit and mapping: We inventoried every page, template, form, and redirect on the Umbraco site, then mapped each one to a WordPress equivalent.
• Design system: We turned the brand into reusable theme styles and components in Figma, which made them easy to translate into WordPress blocks.
• Content migration: I migrated the main page content while the content team migrated articles and other secondary pages.
• Accessibility and speed: Templates were built with semantic markup, keyboard support, and sufficient color contrast, with images sized and compressed as WebP for faster loading.
• Tracking: We rebuilt the GTM container and GA4 event architecture so lead form submissions were properly measured from day one.
• SEO and launch: We built a map from old Umbraco URLs to new ones, checked metadata and canonicals, and launched after staging review.

Bumps along the way

• URL and SEO continuity. Umbraco and WordPress structure URLs differently, so redirects had to be mapped carefully to avoid losing rankings.
• Tracking through forms. Form event tracking wasn't making proper use of GA4 before, so it had to be completely reconfigured.

The finished site

• Gravity Forms lead capture with clean GTM/GA4 tracking.
• Redirect map and metadata carried over from the Umbraco site.
• Persistent Apply Now and Call Us calls to action.
• Many reusable templates and components for new pages.
• A staging and production workflow.
• The ability to run clean A/B tests.
• A CMS the marketing team can edit without a developer.

What I learned

Working in-house on a site that drives real loan volume meant every change had to balance brand, compliance, and conversion. Moving the content into a CMS the team already knew made it possible to keep improving the site long after launch.