Suncoast boosts new membership by 8% with Sitecore CMS

As Florida’s largest credit union with 1.3 million members, Suncoast needs to deliver a best-in-class online experience that reflects its position as an industry leader. They have an aggressive long-term growth goal for the next four years. To support this growth, the website needed to be accessible, inclusive, and engaging for prospective customers, while offering easy access to a range of useful financial tools for current members.

Personalization is central to Suncoast’s digital strategy. “We want to tailor website content to individual users, but our legacy platform lacked the scalability, speed and advanced functionalities required for a tailored, seamless, digital experience,” explained Eric Rook, Website & Marketing Technology Manager at Suncoast.

To modernize its digital experience, Suncoast redesigned its website to Sitecore’s CMS. “The new website is designed to attract and convert customers while strengthening relationships with existing members by delivering better online experiences and easier access to relevant content,” said Rook.

Suncoast engaged Sitecore partner Velir to build its new digital experience and elected to stay with Sitecore for its rich functionality. Velir used the robust Vercel toolset to simplify the deployment. “With Sitecore’s CMS, we have a single cohesive ecosystem, rather than 10-15 different platforms to manage,” explained Rook.

With Sitecore’s advanced platform, Suncoast now delivers faster, smarter content discovery and benefits from more intelligent, streamlined content workflows powered by AI. These capabilities are laying the foundation for advanced personalization based on user behavior, language, and preferences.

Guided by Velir’s implementation expertise, Suncoast transformed its digital platform by moving to Sitecore’s CMS. The shift replaced complex, on-prem systems with a cloud-first setup that is faster to update, easier to manage, and built for growth. Automation and modern deployment practices ensure that new content and features go live quickly and securely, without disruption to members. Strong governance and training empowered Suncoast’s teams to take full advantage of Sitecore’s flexibility, ensuring a smooth transition and long-term confidence in the platform.

Suncoast’s new website is already driving measurable growth, with improved digital experiences leading to an 8% rise in new membership applications since launch. Suncoast also saw 18% more site searches, while results viewed per engaged session decreased 9%, indicating that users are finding what they need in fewer searches. Suncoast’s new ‘Express Lane’ feature now allows users to access frequently used or relevant content more efficiently.

In addition, enhanced performance, faster search, and tailored content are increasing engagement, with a 14% rise in engaged users per session. These gains are underpinned by a five-fold improvement in Google Lighthouse scores, ensuring the site is faster, more accessible, and better optimized for growth.

With a centralized, cloud-based platform, Suncoast can now manage content, personalization, and analytics with ease.

“We can do things faster, at higher quality, and with better outcomes. As well as achieving productivity gains, we’ve enhanced performance, increased scalability, and reduced risk with stronger security,” concludes Rook.