Food, Farming and Countryside Commission Website

The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) is an independent charity working to shape the future of food, farming and the countryside across the UK. Its website, built by another agency in 2020, is where it publishes the reports, briefings, films and podcasts behind that work.

We took over support of the site in 2025, and two needs soon came together. The platform behind the site was reaching the end of its supported life, which put its security at risk. And FFCC was moving to a new three-year strategy built around three strands of work, Political Economy, Voices and Places, which the site didn’t yet reflect. With a significant share of visitors now on their phones, the mobile experience needed attention too. We rebuilt the site to meet all three.

Our first job was to put the site on a secure footing without disrupting FFCC’s publishing. We upgraded and secured the platform, rehearsing every step on a copy of the live site before anything changed for visitors, so FFCC’s whole archive of reports, articles and films came across intact.

We also tidied up the foundations behind the scenes, so the site is easier and quicker to maintain, and put monthly maintenance in place so it stays secure as FFCC grows.

With the site secure, we worked with FFCC’s external relations team to plan how it should reflect the new strategy, and who it needed to serve. Most visitors arrive through a link to a specific report or article, so the structure had to help them find their way from there, as well as explain FFCC’s work to newcomers.

We redesigned the navigation around how FFCC describes its work, with four clear sections, News & conversations, Our work, Evidence and About us, and search a click away from every page. Our work now leads with the three strategic priorities, each with its own hub page, and Evidence brings reports, briefings and working papers together in one place.

We merged News and Conversations into a single hub of more than 300 articles, with redirects so no existing link broke, and added filters by topic, content type and year.

We also designed and built a refreshed look for the homepage, publications and About us pages, working with FFCC’s own new logo and brand artwork. It comes with a shared library of page blocks that FFCC’s team can arrange themselves, so they can build and update pages without waiting on a developer.

On phones, visitors had no quick way to move around FFCC’s longer pages. Every page now has a jump bar that works on any screen and always matches the sections on the page. We also fixed the accessibility issues our audits found, from colour contrast to button sizes, so the site works better for everyone.

We made FFCC’s content easier for search engines and AI tools to understand, describing the organisation and its articles, reports and people in a consistent, structured way, so its work is more likely to surface when people are looking for it.

FFCC’s website is now easier to navigate, and its structure reflects how the organisation describes its own work.

In the month after the rebuilt site launched (9 September to 12 October 2026), compared with the same dates last year, users rose by 43%, publication page views by 69% and mobile users by 44%. Sessions were up 47%, and visitors arriving from organic search viewed 14% more pages per session.

We continue to support the site with monthly updates and maintenance, so it stays secure as FFCC’s new strategy takes shape.