James Cook University creates a unified experience across international sites with Squiz DXP

James Cook University accelerates digital transformation with Squiz DXP, streamlining global web operations, improving governance, and laying the foundation for personalization and agility across campuses in Australia and Singapore

Lorna Hegarty 17 Nov 2025

James Cook University

Founded in 1970, James Cook University (JCU) is Australia’s only university established to focus on the issues of Northern Australia and the Tropics worldwide. The university is dedicated to helping the world’s tropical regions prosper, with a network that includes campuses in Brisbane, Cairns, and Townsville, as well as Singapore.

Industry

Higher Education

Products

CMS, Search, Integrations

The Challenge

James Cook University (JCU) manages a vast and evolving digital ecosystem across campuses in Australia and Singapore. Both sites had long been powered by Squiz, yet operated as separate instances, each with their own governance, design, and content practices.

Over time, this independence created visible differences in structure and experience, making it harder to present a single, cohesive brand to global audiences.

The Australian team led most development in-house, while the Singapore team had a need for ongoing support for updates and fixes. Each approach suited local needs, but together they highlighted an opportunity: to bring both under one modern, unified digital experience.

Meanwhile, years of organic growth had left JCU with more than 11,000 pages and over 300 active content editors. The scale was impressive, but it came with complexity. Templates had multiplied, designs diverged, and managing updates across teams had become increasingly time-consuming. The university saw a clear need to simplify, streamline, and future-proof their digital foundation.

As Adam Humphrey, Manager of Strategy and Insights at JCU, explains: “We saw this as an opportunity to hit the reset button. Our existing setup had inherited some legacy design and technical debt, and we needed a way to modernize faster, smarter, and with better control.”

To achieve that, JCU needed to:

Unify design and governance across Australia and Singapore
Streamline content management for a large, distributed editorial team
Improve scalability and efficiency for future growth
Lay the groundwork for personalization and A/B testing capabilities
Strengthen security and performance across its digital environment

The Solution

To accelerate modernization, JCU chose to move onto Squiz DXP using a lift-and-shift migration model that allowed the entire site to be migrated quickly while giving the in-house team control over the gradual rebuild.

This approach provided a clean starting point. By migrating existing content as-is, JCU could immediately establish a single, unified environment, then rebuild pages systematically with stronger governance, accessibility, and performance in mind. It also helped the team avoid investing time in redundant or outdated content that was uncovered during their planned web audit.

The migration began with a Cloudflare Orange to Orange integration, which ensured that JCU’s existing Cloudflare security controls could continue to apply before traffic reached Squiz’s Cloudflare-protected environment. This allowed both layers of protection to work together from the outset, strengthening the university’s overall security during the transition and beyond.

From there, JCU worked with Squiz’s migration specialists to move their Squiz Funnelback Search and the Squiz Content Management System (CMS) instances, supported by dedicated subject matter experts for each product area. The clear division of responsibilities made the process efficient and transparent.

JCU’s in-house technical capability helped them engage deeply in solution discussions and make fast decisions throughout the migration. During migration testing, the teams also identified and resolved several legacy issues in the existing setup, ensuring the new environment was clean, stable, and ready for the rebuild.

For organizations without internal technical resources, Squiz’s migration specialists can provide this guidance directly, ensuring clarity and momentum at each stage of the process.

“The structure of the Squiz migration team made a big difference,” says Adam. “We had clear leads for each area (Cloudflare integration, Funnelback Search, CMS) and weekly check-ins that kept everyone aligned. The communication was transparent, and any issues we found in testing were resolved quickly.”

In addition to the core migration, JCU began redesigning their homepage from the ground up, informed by extensive user testing with hundreds of prospective students. The new design features a modern layout, optimized for mobile and tablet users, and a refreshed global navigation structure to simplify access to key study areas and course information.

Using the Squiz component service, JCU can now standardize templates, improve efficiency, and lock down permissions, reducing fragmentation across their decentralized editorial base. The new templated model will also enable faster content deployment and a more consistent user experience across their digital ecosystems.

The Outcomes

Despite just completing the migration, JCU is already seeing great improvements in speed, consistency, and control. By consolidating around 90 content container templates into just 20, the web team is creating a more agile and cohesive digital environment.

Early feedback shows that standardizing layouts and design systems is reducing build times and simplifying maintenance. With the foundations in place, JCU expects to accelerate page rollout over the coming months, starting with key assets such as the homepage, course pages, and search functionality.

The DXP migration has also laid the groundwork for next-generation capabilities such as personalization, A/B testing, and data-driven optimization. Plans are underway to integrate Squiz DXP’s Datastore with CourseLoop’s marketer module, enabling JCU to deliver more tailored, accurate course information for both domestic and international audiences.

“More than moving platforms, we’re setting ourselves up for what’s next,” says Adam. “Once the foundations are in place, we’ll be able to test, personalize, and continuously improve based on data to deliver a better experience for our prospective students, wherever they are.”

For JCU, the migration represents a long-term investment in digital agility and governance. Uniting the Australian and Singapore campuses under a single DXP is giving the university a scalable foundation for the future of student engagement and institutional growth.