Project overview
MERKUR was running three separate websites: the main MERKUR Casino site, a MERKUR Slots venues site and a corporate site. Each had its own design, content and search history, which split the brand's online presence and made every update three times the work.
The goal was a single, modern website that serves slots players, casino players and corporate audiences from one platform, and that MERKUR's marketing team could manage day to day without relying on developers.
I was the developer on the project at FearNaught, working alongside Cygnus, the design agency behind the new look, QueryClick, MERKUR's SEO agency, and MERKUR's in-house marketing team.
Solution & key features
Modular Gutenberg blocks system
Cygnus designed the new site as a library of reusable sections rather than fixed page templates. Across more than 45 page designs for the Slots, Casino and Corporate areas, the same modules appear again and again: intro headers, card carousels for games, promotions and news, video sections, testimonials, FAQs, venue search and contact forms.
I built this library as a custom Gutenberg blocks plugin, with every module available as a block the content team can place on any page. Each block was built for wide customisation: layout variants, backgrounds, colour accents, imagery, links and content can all change per use, while typography, spacing and the brand's look stay consistent.
Blocks are developed in React for the editor and rendered with PHP where content is dynamic, styled with Tailwind CSS and bundled with webpack. GSAP and ScrollTrigger animate the brand's playful decorative elements, such as floating coins, cards and dice, without getting in the way of the content.
Three websites merged into one
The biggest risk in the project was consolidating three websites into merkurcasinouk.com without losing years of search visibility. Every venue page, news article and corporate page on the old sites had to find a new home in the new structure.
I mapped each old URL to its new destination and set up over 400 permanent redirects, generating them from content exports rather than by hand. A domain-wide fallback on the old venues domain catches anything not explicitly mapped, so even forgotten links land on the right page instead of an error. News articles were consolidated under a single blog, and corporate content was rebuilt as About Us, Community and Responsibility sections within the main site.
Migrations were rehearsed on a local copy of the site with WP-CLI before going near production.
Venue finder & campaign landing pages
With more than 200 venues, helping visitors find their nearest one is central to the site. The venue finder lets visitors search by location, and every venue has its own page carried over from the old venues site.
MERKUR's marketing team regularly runs promotions across its venues, so I made the venue finder reusable on campaign landing pages. Each campaign gets its own branded page, with the campaign artwork and messaging at the top and the full venue search underneath. I worked directly with MERKUR's online content lead and their campaign designers to agree what each campaign could change within the existing blocks, which kept new campaigns fast to launch and consistent with the brand.
SEO & technical foundations
With years of search history spread across three domains, SEO was a priority throughout the project. I worked closely with QueryClick, MERKUR's SEO agency, to make sure the new site was built to be found:
- Crawlable listings: news and venue listings on real paginated URLs with server-rendered links, so every article and venue page is reachable by search engines
- Structured data: Schema.org ItemList markup on listings, working alongside Rank Math's own schema without duplicates
- Dynamic SEO titles and descriptions for paginated archives, managed through Rank Math
- Legacy URL handling: outdated URLs from the old sites redirected to their closest match
- Server and security: HSTS headers, robots.txt rules and lowercase URL handling
- Lean markup: trimmed HTML for lighter, faster pages
Results & impact
MERKUR now runs one website instead of three, built on a block system its own team uses to create pages and campaigns.
- One brand, one site: three websites consolidated into merkurcasinouk.com, with existing URLs and search history preserved
- One codebase, three audiences: slots players, casino players and corporate readers served by the same block library
- Self-sufficient marketing team: new pages, promotions and campaign landing pages built in the editor, without developer time
- Search-ready foundation: every development issue from an independent technical SEO audit resolved
Conclusion
By bringing three websites together on a single modular WordPress platform, I helped MERKUR present one clear brand to its players and partners. The block system turned Cygnus's design into a flexible toolkit the marketing team uses every week, while the migration and post-launch SEO work protected the search visibility built up across the old sites. The result is a site that is easier to manage, faster to update and ready to grow with the business.