Clios.com
Clio Awards is a globally recognized authority in creative excellence, honoring groundbreaking work across advertising, design, entertainment, and culture. For decades, Clio has served as both an awards institution and a cultural touchstone for the creative industry, with an audience that spans agencies, brands, production companies, and individual creatives worldwide.
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Clio Awards partnered with Spruce to modernize its flagship digital presence: Clios.com.
One of the most prestigious programs in the advertising and communications industries, the website serves as a global showcase for the Clio Awards programs, including winning work, jurors, categories, and event information.
Spruce led a full redesign and re-platforming of the site, transitioning it from a legacy Drupal platform to WordPress. The goal: deliver a faster, more flexible, and scalable site capable of supporting Clio’s growing international audience and content needs.
[Challenge / Problem Statement]
Clio.com hosted a large and ever-growing archive of awards content, winner portfolios, jury bios, categories, media assets, and brand history—much of it tied to a rigid Drupal CMS structure. The site was difficult to update, lacked scalability, and did not support modern publishing workflows.
The client needed a more efficient and visually compelling way to present its awards data while reducing editorial friction and future maintenance complexity.
Our
Strategy
A scalable, editor-first platform built to support creative excellence for a global audience.
We modernized Clio’s digital ecosystem by migrating both platforms from Drupal to a custom WordPress foundation, pairing a flexible design system with editor-friendly tools. The solution balances structured awards data with dynamic editorial storytelling, delivering improved performance, scalability, and autonomy in publishing across both sites.
UX Strategy and Platform Architecture
Spruce began with a comprehensive UX and technical audit of the site’s legacy Drupal build, including data models for awards, people, categories, and multimedia assets. Working closely with Clio’s team, we created a custom WordPress theme and component library that translated the brand’s design sensibility into a flexible, Gutenberg-based editing environment.
The CMS migration was structured to preserve data integrity while increasing editorial independence, allowing non-technical users to easily update content, publish new winners, and create custom landing pages for different Clio programs and events.
Awards Database Migration
Spruce developed and executed a structured migration plan to move complex relational data—such as winners by year and category, juror records, and media assets—into WordPress without data loss or performance degradation. Every element of the archive was preserved, restructured where necessary, and aligned with new templates to improve usability and search.
Infrastructure and Performance Optimization
Due to the site’s reliance on high-volume traffic and media-rich content, Spruce implemented advanced caching strategies, CDN integration, and performance tuning at the infrastructure level. These improvements ensured that clio.com loads quickly, even during spikes around award announcements and event coverage.
Spruce also helped modernize Clio’s cloud architecture to support scalable growth and easier DevOps workflows.
UX Strategy and Platform Architecture
Spruce began with a comprehensive UX and technical audit of the site’s legacy Drupal build, including data models for awards, people, categories, and multimedia assets. Working closely with Clio’s team, we created a custom WordPress theme and component library that translated the brand’s design sensibility into a flexible, Gutenberg-based editing environment.
The CMS migration was structured to preserve data integrity while increasing editorial independence, allowing non-technical users to easily update content, publish new winners, and create custom landing pages for different Clio programs and events.
Awards Database Migration
Spruce developed and executed a structured migration plan to move complex relational data—such as winners by year and category, juror records, and media assets—into WordPress without data loss or performance degradation. Every element of the archive was preserved, restructured where necessary, and aligned with new templates to improve usability and search.
Infrastructure and Performance Optimization
Due to the site’s reliance on high-volume traffic and media-rich content, Spruce implemented advanced caching strategies, CDN integration, and performance tuning at the infrastructure level. These improvements ensured that clio.com loads quickly, even during spikes around award announcements and event coverage.
Spruce also helped modernize Clio’s cloud architecture to support scalable growth and easier DevOps workflows.
Looking
Ahead
The redesigned platforms delivered measurable improvements across usability, performance, and internal efficiency.
For Clio.com, the new system successfully preserved decades of awards history while dramatically simplifying content management.
Page load times improved by approximately 50%, and the modular CMS architecture now supports future awards programs, new categories, and expanded storytelling without requiring structural overhauls.
Spruce has been truly a strategic partner for us; we could not have done it without you.
Head of Product, Clio Awards
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