Originally published on 26 January 2026; last updated on 26 January 2026.
**Disclaimer: This blog post is not affiliated with Experian. While I am employed by Experian, this content was not sponsored or paid for by the company. All opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
Better your score. Better your story. That’s the objective for people to use Experian. But people buy into books at times based on the front over, and that’s the objective of the .co.uk domain. Over the time I have worked at Experian I have seen the digital transformation that has taken place, with a whole new experience in session, a new score and a wide array of new features. And that’s all good as the book content if you’ve been given the recommendation, but the front cover is what draws the eye.
The domain is what contains the content to help people whether it’s directly, through chatbots or LLMs but the statement is the same, when people want the information they want it quickly in a place that they can trust. But the current site had been pushed to its limit on the technology it had, and it just wasn’t compatible with the modern world.
It’s not been often in my career that I’ve been fortunate enough to work on things that have long term value. I’ve built maps that target data for concerts when planning new shows, metadata to reduce insurance fraud, energy saving and security products to name a few. But these are all small features in a long term product that have all gone in the passage of time, whether it’s through insolvency, rewrites or modern implementations. And it’s been even rarer for me to be a decision maker in the process, so for this opportunity to come up for me, to design the front cover on a product used by millions, I wanted to make sure it was as good as it could be.
After looking at a few frameworks that I thought could be potential suitors for the .co.uk domain, I settled on recommending Astro as the framework of choice. For people that don’t know, Astro is a framework designed for content driven sites, with the benefits of server side rendering, vendor integrations and agnostic framework integration through islands, with high quality performance. This allowed the content driven elements of the site to be kept with speed, but also take advantage of islands (where you can use a framework such as react directly inside Astro) to build more complex QOL features for customers that are available for everyone. And all the other benefits of a fast developer experience that you would expect from any framework today.
There are all the other benefits of a more modern framework such as themes, MCP server integrations and in-built auditing tools to improve the A11Y, to help with the MO that everyone deserves a better story. But there’s also unique cases for Experian. The guide content is self-serve, and they need to be able to create the content and pages with as minimal effort as possible. Using the MDX integration, templating and a script, they can create a new guide within sixty seconds with SEO optimisation through the frontmatter (a place in the components where you can access props and more, which you can find out about here.
I’m a huge fan of Astro, mainly due to its simplicity, while keeping the beauty in development. Going back to basics and being allowed to isolate the complexity brings the benefits of both worlds, and the agnostic elements allow you to keep up to date should you decide to change your interactive JS framework. You can keep the old while creating the new. As you may have told, this website you’re reading this on has been redone in Astro and all built within a weekend (which is why some bits may look a bit ugly, that’s me thinking about how far I want to push this over the framework itself.)
So after making Astro my recommendation we had to get business approval. And clearly there were lots of questions that were going to be asked from the framework. Can it support all the things that the current site can do and more, will it affect SEO. But every conversation was positive, the framework and the data did the talking. The zero JS by default approach allowed a way of targeting more customers through their browser choices, the speed focus and SEO optimisation removed the fears, and we got the support to rebuild the site in Astro, as long as we supported dual running.
We reviewed the way the current site was hosted and found a way to merge the new with the old (I can’t say too much here about how but in as simple terms as possible, build the new and anything that matches on an old route, overwrite). And then set ourselves the ambitious target of as much as possible within six months. Bear in mind we didn’t even have a component library we could use, we basically were starting from scratch outside of a small POC to test our assumptions.
The initial focus was on guides. These take up over half the website, are templated and use the core components (nav bar, footer, buttons etc.) but we had to migrate them. And it was a fear that even them alone (at time of writing there are about 200 of them) was a mammoth task in itself. And what about new content as well? There has to be a cut off point.
But I wasn’t worried, mainly because it wasn’t a question to me of ‘when can we do it by?’, but ‘how can we do it as quickly as possible?’. Using some AI tools, I quickly made up a bash script that converted the old template into the new but also allowed some corrections to be made with directory structure, file names and the ability to take it further (could we do spell checking at the same time, flags for other content?). And using the base of this, create a script that could be plugged into an AI agent to create new content guides. As mentioned earlier it takes me about sixty seconds, and nearly all the time is typing in what I need, not in the generation itself.
And currently, there is some content out there for guides that use astro. We’ve been able to minimise impact through the dual running, allowing us to drip feed guides and alternate content as we need too, but the ability is there to migrate and create at a speed we weren’t able to before. There are plans to get more guides converted, but this is more a prioritisation question over a technical one.
There are other pages that we have converted, we have an island that uses google maps for increased interactivity. And we can make this as detailed as we need too and it is all isolated on that island, while allowing that consistency that the site never had before.
Truthfully, it has been a point of pride for me to be able to create something like this with the support I have had. I’ve been fortunate to work with a team full of optimism, positivity and drive. A team that is willing to say how far we can go as well as how far we have come. And I know where it is now may look like a brand new front cover, but truthfully all we have done is have the canvas and palette ready to say not just within the UK, but worldwide, this is what we can do when the right people are in the right place at the right time.