IQ Group has spent 25 years earning the trust of Australia’s most significant financial services organisations. With more than 100 expert consultants, a 90%+ repeat client rate, and the #1 ranking for transitions in Australia, the business had everything going for it – except a website that reflected that standing.
The old site had grown unwieldy. Years of incremental additions had layered plugin upon plugin into a WordPress build that was slow, hard to maintain, and impossible to scale. The brand, the ambition, and the digital experience had drifted apart. It was time to fix that properly.
A ground-up rebuild, not another round of patches
IQ Group came to The Animals with a clear mandate: rebuild the site properly. Not a cosmetic refresh – a ground-up redesign that would reflect the firm’s authority in financial services, perform at the standard their clients expected, and give the internal team a platform they could actually manage day-to-day without calling a developer every time a page needed updating.
The brief covered a full visual redesign, content restructure, performance optimisation, and a technical rebuild that eliminated the bloated plugin stack that had accumulated over years of workarounds.
Strip it back. Build it right.
We started with the foundations. The existing WordPress build had accumulated a significant number of plugins over the life of the site – each one adding overhead to every page load, creating update dependencies, and introducing points of failure. The rebuild stripped that back, replacing plugin-dependent solutions with purpose-built, lightweight code and cutting plugin overhead substantially.
On the design side, we built a system rather than a set of pages. IQ Group operates across superannuation and wealth, banking, and insurance – each with its own services and audience. The new site needed to speak to each sector without fragmenting the brand. We developed a modular design language: a tight component set that flexes across the full breadth of IQ Group’s offering while maintaining visual cohesion and a premium B2B feel.
Content was restructured to lead with clarity. IQ Group’s expertise runs deep – XeP3, managed services, regulatory change, remediation, strategic advisory – and the previous architecture made it hard for visitors to find what they needed. We reworked the information architecture so the right audience reached the right content in fewer clicks.
Faster, leaner, and built for the long term
The rebuild delivered an improved UpGuard cyber security rating alongside a measurable lift in page speed. Plugin overhead was reduced, cutting maintenance burden and eliminating a chronic source of performance drag. The internal team now manage content updates independently, without agency involvement for day-to-day changes.
More than the numbers, IQ Group now has a website that does justice to what they’ve built over 25 years – a precise, authoritative digital presence that holds its own against the global consultancies they compete with for Australia’s most significant financial services mandates.
Why this project matters to us
Financial services consulting is a world where credibility is everything and trust is hard-won. IQ Group had earned both – across 25 years, hundreds of engagements, and relationships with some of Australia’s most significant funds and institutions. What they hadn’t had was a website that told that story with the same rigour they bring to their client work.
Getting to rebuild that from scratch – to work through the architecture, the design system, the content strategy, and the technical execution together – is exactly the kind of brief we want more of. Meaningful businesses with genuine expertise deserve digital work that reflects that. This one does.
Services delivered: Website redesign · WordPress rebuild · Information architecture · Performance optimisation · Content strategy
