Growth Without Disruption: How Energy Safety Canada Modernized Its Member Experience

About the project

The Client

Energy Safety Canada (ESC) is Canada's national safety association for the energy industry. It formed in 2017, when Enform and the Oil Sands Safety Association merged into one organization. Today it runs on roughly $32M in annual revenue with around 110 staff, out of Calgary, Alberta. ESC certifies and trains workers across the energy sector, much of it through a network of Authorized Training Providers, and its website is where members find courses, register, and manage their credentials.

The Situation

ESC runs its entire certification business through its website: course registration, credentials, standards, all of it. But the site ran on Kentico CMS v12 with an aging iMIS RiSE front end. Content changes needed a developer. Search barely worked across a library of 1,000+ resources. And membership, learning, and commerce all lived in separate, disconnected systems. The website had become mission-critical infrastructure without a platform built to support it.

The Challenge

• Content bottlenecks and editorial mistrust. Every routine change ran through a rigid templating system only developers could touch. A new page or a course update meant opening a ticket and waiting. Over time, the marketing team lost confidence in the platform and started building workarounds instead.

• Broken discovery across a large library. ESC had built up more than 1,000 resources: webinars, standards, tools, and documents. Search barely worked across them, so a library ESC spent years building was quietly going unused. Quality varied too, with strong pages sitting next to badly out-of-date ones.

• Fragmented systems and disconnected data. Content, membership, learning, and commerce ran as separate silos with no shared source of truth. Getting a clean view of a member across courses, credentials, and payments meant manual work to keep records in sync.

• Ungoverned SEO. No single team or process governed SEO across ESC's regional instances. Pages were optimized inconsistently, if at all, so the site's ability to bring in new members through search was left mostly to chance.

ESC needed a platform its own team could run, without adding risk to the membership, course, and payment systems already working underneath it. It ran a competitive RFP for a modern CMS and chose Axelerant as its delivery partner.

The solution

The guiding idea was simple: rebuild the front end, and do not touch what already works. Every decision had to protect the systems of record, hand control back to ESC's team, or make the site easier to find, use, and manage.

• Discovery first. A six to seven week discovery phase set the direction. It produced functional and technical workshops, a full content audit and new content architecture, user-role analysis and portal mapping, customer journey maps, API guidelines for the iMIS integration, Figma prototypes for a component-based design system, and a roadmap and recommendation report.

• Keep iMIS, build around it. Drupal 11 sits over the existing stack as an orchestration layer, not a full rebuild. Drupal owns the content, course and product listings, browse and search and filter, the storefront, the Knowledge Hub, member-facing pages, accessibility, and SEO. iMIS keeps membership data, course data, cart, checkout, and payments as the unchanged system of record. Custom styling and template overrides make the checkout handoff feel like one site, not two.

• Course discovery that actually works. Course data comes from iMIS and is surfaced on Drupal through Algolia. Members filter by provider (ESC direct or an Authorized Training Provider), location, and date, see provider locations on an interactive map, and register straight back in iMIS, with no second system to reconcile.

• One home for all ESC resources. The old library became the Knowledge Hub, holding 1,000+ items: webinars, podcasts, micro-trainings, tools, documents, and standards. It handles PDFs, video, audio, and links, with tagging, filtering, full-text search, document preview, and download tracking, so ESC can finally see how people use what it publishes.

• Five portals, five different jobs. Five portal experiences sit on one identity layer over iMIS, using SSO/OAuth and role-based access. Students register and view their certifications and training history. Instructors manage courses and rosters. Authorized Training Providers manage access codes and rostered registration. Company administrators handle bulk registration, rosters, and invoicing. Auditors run COR/SECOR audits and results.

• Commerce without new compliance headaches. The storefront and cart live in Drupal, while payment and order handling stay in iMIS. That kept PCI scope off the Drupal build and let ESC keep its existing payment setup, covering both individual course purchases and safety toolkit sales.

• A map that can grow past fall protection. In a later engagement, Axelerant built a vector-based interactive map, not the Google Maps API. Users click a province to see its fall-protection rules, with federal regulations and CSA standards shown as extra regions. It is built as a generic engine, so it can cover other safety regulations later, with per-record update dates and a clear research disclaimer.

• SEO, with an eye on AI search. The SEO migration ran as its own engagement alongside the build, with client sign-off at four milestones. The goal went beyond protecting rankings to Answer Engine Optimization: structuring content so AI-driven search can find and use it. The work included 1,780 301 redirects, canonical tags, schema markup, and a meta rewrite across the site's top pages.

The results

ESC launched on Drupal 11 on 26 May 2026. The numbers below come from Google Search Console and GA4, 28 May to 15 June 2026, so they reflect the first three weeks live.

1. Pages load about 7x faster. Under Kentico, every page failed Google's Core Web Vitals. On Drupal 11, real visitors pass. Load times dropped from over 15 seconds to about 2 seconds, and lab scores moved from 80 desktop and 28 mobile to 100 and 95.

2. 36,000 organic visits a month at an 8.7% CTR. Organic traffic reached roughly 36,000 visits a month, 83% of it from Canada, at an average click-through rate of 8.7%, well above the 3 to 5% typical for the niche. Weekday clicks run 1,500 to 1,800 a day, peaking at a 10.3% CTR on 9 June 2026.

3. 13,100 keywords ranked, 84.9% CTR on branded search. The site now ranks for 13,100 keywords worldwide and 6,400 in Canada. Non-branded searches, the terms members use before they know ESC by name, already drive 11,500 visits a month, and the branded query converts at 84.9% at position one.

4. Course search became the busiest page on the site. The new course discovery experience logged 144,901 views and 18,476 active users since launch, at a 90-second average time on page. Members find and register for courses faster than before.

5. Editors run the site without developers. ESC's communications team now makes content changes directly, without waiting on a developer for every update. That single change removed the biggest bottleneck the old platform created.

6. Five portals, zero disruption to membership data. Students, instructors, training providers, company administrators, and auditors each got their own secure portal, built without touching the membership and payment systems already running in iMIS.

7. A clean migration, AEO built in. The move executed 1,780 redirects with new canonical tags and schema markup across top pages, without losing rankings, and structured content for AI search from day one.

8. Fully WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. Accessibility scores went from 66 out of 100 to 95, a 29-point gain, aligning ESC with Canadian public-sector procurement requirements.

By the numbers:

• Page loads: over 15 seconds to about 2 seconds (about 7x faster); lab scores 80 desktop / 28 mobile to 100 / 95; every page now passes Core Web Vitals.
• Accessibility: 66 to 95 out of 100 (29-point gain), fully WCAG 2.1 AA.
• 36,000 organic visits a month (83% from Canada) at an 8.7% average CTR; 13,100 keywords worldwide (6,400 in Canada); 84.9% CTR on branded search at position one.
• Course search: 144,901 views, 18,476 active users, 90-second average time on page.
• 1,780 301 redirects executed with rankings held.
• Launched 26 May 2026; measured 28 May to 15 June 2026.