Gumtree

Gumtree is Australia’s premier community marketplace, connecting millions of users across diverse categories including Motors, Jobs, Real Estate, and Home & Garden. As a household name and a cornerstone of the Australian circular economy, the platform manages over 2 million live listings and reaches approximately 6 million Australians every month.

Client Location

Australia

Model

Project Based

Link

https://www.gumtree.com.au/

Project Detail

What Was The Brief?

Operating within a complex multi-site WordPress environment, Gumtree required a specialised technical partner to manage the development and synchronisation of numerous "Lines of Business" (LOB) sites. The brief focused on providing a dedicated squad of developers and project managers to standardise the UI/UX across their ecosystem while launching new, high-priority landing pages for initiatives like Gumtree Jobs and Gumtree Pay.

Back-End

DevOps

Front-End

Graphic Designer

Project Manager

Quality Assurance

How Did We Fix It

Identifying the Key Challenges

The Hurdles

Multi-Site Synchronisation Complexity:
Managing brand and functional consistency across disparate WordPress sites (Cars, Jobs, Pets, etc.) presented a continuous challenge, as updates in one area often risked breaking the visual or technical logic in another.
SEO & Traffic Sensitivity:
With hundreds of legacy blogs and reviews driving significant organic traffic, any design overhaul or architectural change had to be executed with extreme precision to prevent indexing drops or loss of search authority.
High-Velocity Deployment:
Gumtree required the ability to spin up new, high-performance landing pages and micro-sites rapidly to support evolving marketing campaigns without taxing their core internal engineering team.
Technical Debt & Standardisation:
The existing WordPress fleet featured varied coding standards and aging components that required a systematic review to align with Gumtree’s modern brand guidelines and performance benchmarks.

The Solutions

Embedded Dedicated WordPress Squad:
SoftwareSeni deployed a cross-functional team comprised of specialist WordPress developers, UI/UX designers, and a Senior PM to act as an extension of Gumtree’s product team, taking full ownership of the multi-site environment.
Component Standardisation:
The team conducted a comprehensive audit of the global WordPress ecosystem, successfully standardising components and "look and feel" across all LOB sites to ensure a seamless, professional user journey regardless of the category.
Meticulous SEO-First Migration:
During the design overhaul of hundreds of existing content pages, SoftwareSeni implemented a rigorous migration protocol that prioritised URL structure and metadata integrity, ensuring that Gumtree’s massive organic reach remained protected.
Agile Micro-Site Development:
By leveraging a standardised library of optimised blocks and templates, the squad enabled the rapid launch of strategic new products, such as the Gumtree Jobs portal and specialised niche categories, providing the business with the agility to respond to market shifts in real-time.

Technology Stack

Tools That Powered This Project

WordPress

HTML5

CSS3

What Our Client Said

“The team at SoftwareSeni have been brilliant at producing high quality work for Gumtree Group. From start to finish processes and communication remain a breeze, i look forward to seeing the team bring our vision to life.”

Tom Rothwell

Product & Engineering Manager