The Award-Winning CMS That Put Food Alert Back in Control.
First Internet designed and built a bespoke WordPress CMS for Food Alert that empowered their marketing team, improved performance, and won Best Deployment of a CMS at the UK Dev Awards.
Website build
Website design
+47%
Increase in pageviews
120
Hours saved per year
92
Google sitespeed performance
Winner
Best bespoke CMS
Food Alert is a leading food safety, health and compliance consultancy, supporting over 6,000 hospitality businesses including brands such as Deliveroo, Nando’s and Burger King.
Their expertise helps restaurants, hotels and food businesses stay compliant, safe and operational, but their website didn’t reflect the scale or credibility of their work.
Even worse, their internal marketing team couldn’t effectively manage it.
The CMS was clunky, unintuitive and difficult to update, making it almost impossible to use the website as a meaningful marketing or lead generation tool.
That’s where we came in.
Food Alert needed a website and CMS that worked for both their users and their internal team.
The existing platform created several major problems:
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Updating content was slow and difficult due to a poorly structured CMS
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The website didn’t reflect the company’s strong brand or high-profile client portfolio
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Marketing activity was limited because publishing new content required technical support
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Valuable time was being lost managing spam and misdirected enquiries
The goal was to build a flexible, intuitive CMS that allowed Food Alert’s internal team to manage the website easily while also delivering a faster, better-performing site for users.
Key objectives included:
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Creating a clear, intuitive CMS interface for the marketing team
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Allowing the team to build new page templates themselves
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Improving website performance and page speed
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Increasing page views and engagement by at least 20%
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Reducing the time spent managing enquiries and spam
In short, Food Alert needed a CMS that actually empowered the people using it.
Designing a CMS that worked just as well for the internal team as it did for website visitors.
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Designing for two audiences
The site had to work for two very different audiences:
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Prospective clients visiting the website
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The internal marketing team managing the CMS
Balancing usability for both groups required careful planning and extensive UX thinking.
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Fighting spam while protecting enquiries
Food Alert previously struggled with large volumes of spam submissions.
We implemented robust CAPTCHA protection while integrating form submissions directly into Salesforce — ensuring genuine enquiries were captured without increasing admin workload.
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Late-stage feature changes
Just before launch, the client changed the brief for the resource hub, requesting a more sophisticated gated content area.
With limited time remaining, we designed a hybrid approach that combined freely accessible resources with two types of gated content, allowing users to preview material before submitting their details.
The result? A much more effective lead capture system.
First Internet delivered a bespoke WordPress CMS implementation, carefully engineered to remove unnecessary complexity and give the Food Alert team full control of their website.
The platform was based on our custom WordPress framework, designed to strip out bloat, streamline the admin experience and optimise the site for both usability and SEO.
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A CMS built for real users
The CMS admin area was completely restructured to make it clearer, simpler and easier to navigate.
Using a system of blocks and tabbed content, the marketing team can easily edit page sections, create new content and update pages without developer support.
This means updates that once required agency input can now be done quickly in-house.
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Flexible page building
We enhanced the WordPress Gutenberg editor to allow Food Alert to build completely new templates using flexible content blocks.
These blocks can be reused across the site, repositioned on any page and customised to create unique layouts.
In other words, the marketing team can build new landing pages and content layouts themselves, without writing a single line of code.
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Smarter media management
To improve performance and consistency, we introduced image tools directly within the CMS.
Users can crop banners for desktop, mobile and tablet directly inside the platform, removing the need for external design work and ensuring visuals always display correctly across devices.
We also engineered the CMS to support SVG icons, improving page speed and ensuring consistent visual quality.
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Resource hub with gated content
We created a resource hub combining blog content, downloadable resources and gated assets.
Different types of content can be managed via a simple dropdown in the CMS, allowing the team to decide whether resources are:
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Freely accessible
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Gated behind a data capture form
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Downloadable after submitting information
This flexibility helped transform the site into a more powerful lead generation platform.
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Secure and integrated
The CMS also includes:
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Two-factor authentication for improved security
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Advanced spam filtering to reduce unwanted enquiries
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Salesforce integration for form submissions
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Flexible enquiry and payment forms depending on the service offered
Each form routes enquiries directly to the relevant internal contact, saving time and improving response speed.
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The new platform transformed both the website experience and the internal workflow for the Food Alert team.
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47% increase in page views since launch, driven by the team’s ability to publish fresh content regularly.
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120 hours saved per year through improved spam filtering and form management.
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Marketing teams can now build new page templates themselves, eliminating the need for development time (previously around 1.5 days per template).
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Google PageSpeed score of 92, delivering faster page load times and improved performance.
And perhaps the biggest result of all?
This CMS implementation won Best Deployment of a CMS at the UK Dev Awards, recognising the platform’s innovative design, flexibility and measurable business impact.
Not bad for a content management system.
Mulmar
SV Clinic
