How to Unify a Fragmented Enterprise Website
Lessons from replatforming Salesforce.com, in the words of the executives who led it, and the results.
Between 2020 and 2025, Salesforce unified more than 40 disconnected digital properties into a single platform, salesforce.com. Fantasy led the experience strategy, information architecture, design system, and product design for the replatform.
Today 85% of salesforce.com webpages flow through the new system, and organic traffic converts into leads, pipeline, and ACV at a higher rate.
This is what the people who led it learned, and what any enterprise facing a fragmented digital ecosystem can take from it.
Why do enterprise websites fragment in the first place?
Fragmentation is the default outcome of growth. Salesforce started in 1999, acquired steadily, rebranded products often, and let distributed teams publish independently for two decades. This snowballed into 40+ disconnected properties.
Eric Stahl, EVP of Marketing Technology at Salesforce, described the mechanics: "Most people just add and add and add, and they're not keeping content up to date. It's many distributed teams and people coming and going over the years, and if you're not careful, it can get very out of control."
The user experience made the cost visible. "Every page felt like a different experience, so it felt like I was going to different brands everywhere I went," recalled Bobby Sabnani, Director of Product Management at Fantasy. Sarah Murgel, then VP of Experience Strategy and UX at Salesforce, put it more precisely: users were experiencing the Salesforce org chart, and the org chart changes with great frequency.
A fragmented website is an organizational problem wearing a design costume. Redesign the pages without changing how the organization publishes, and the fragmentation returns on the same schedule it arrived.
What does an outside partner actually add to a replatform?
Objectivity, mainly. "When we look for a partner, we're looking for a few things," Stahl said. "One, we really need an objective point of view. It's so easy to be in the middle of these experiences and the content that you really can't look at it with a beginner's mind."
The second thing is customer understanding that goes deeper than the org chart. What Stahl remembered from Fantasy's pitch: "Fantasy understood that Salesforce as a CRM vendor needs to understand everything about our customers. We needed the data about each person to understand who they are, what products they have, where they are in their journey with us."
The scale of listening that followed tells you what the work really was. Sabnani spoke to between 60 and 100 people in his first month, just about product detail pages and the homepage. Across the engagement, the team interacted with many hundreds of stakeholders. Unifying 40+ properties meant unifying hundreds of teams behind one vision first.
We really needed an objective point of view. It's so easy to be in the middle of these experiences and content that you really can't look at it with a beginner's mind.Eric Stahl, EVP of Marketing Technology, Salesforce
Why design the publishing system before the pages?
Because pages decay and systems compound. The most important lens Fantasy brought, in Murgel's words, "was the idea of a system that was the genesis of our own custom-made CMS called PageBuilder." Fantasy designed the system thinking, the design language, and the component logic. Salesforce's internal engineering team built the platform.
The founding idea was decentralization with standards. "We took a look at some of the best practices that are out there for decentralized content creation and came up with this idea of building the Squarespace for Salesforce," Murgel said. "Democratized content, democratized brand expression, but run standards and best practices through the lens of the system."
The same logic applied to navigation, historically the most contested territory on any enterprise site. "Everyone has an opinion. Everyone wants their thing featured in the navigation," Stahl said. "So we built a really flexible system where it was authorable, meaning we weren't hard coding the navigation. We created a set of authoring tools that allowed us to consistently evolve the navigation in whatever direction we wanted it to go."
Authorable is the key word. The system assumes no decision is final. It is designed for the organization Salesforce will be next year, not the one it was at kickoff.
How do hundreds of teams publish without breaking the brand?
Accountability moves to the edge; standards live in the system. Salesforce empowered distributed teams to own their sections outright. Product marketing owns product pages, with trained web authors on those teams, publishing through PageBuilder's standard componentry without waiting on a central digital team.
An opinionated design system is what makes that safe. The intent, as the team framed it: force everyone to build with standard building blocks that drive quality and consistency across every webpage on the site. Consistency stops being a review process and becomes a property of the tools.
The product pages show what the system was for. The old ones ran 11 levels deep for a single product. The redesign inverted the logic, as Jess Martin, User Experience Lead at Fantasy, explained: "What we really wanted to do was to turn that into a more effective sales conversion tool by simplifying the message, and offering ways for users to dig deeper if they needed to."
What results did the Salesforce replatform produce?
Organic search traffic grew substantially following the replatform's technical SEO and content strategy work, converting at a higher rate into form completions, chat sessions, and inbound calls.
Higher-converting traffic became revenue. "All of that is turning into leads and pipeline and ACV," Stahl said.
Murgel measured a different outcome: speed. "Our entire organization is able to take action a lot faster and more effectively because of that foundation." The replatform also changed how teams work. Processes Fantasy used during the engagement were adopted by Salesforce teams and outlived the project.
I would not hesitate at all to hire Fantasy again in any capacity. The partnership, the creativity, the get it done attitude, the humility and just general ease of partnership was really amazing.Sarah Murgel, former VP of Experience Strategy and UX, Salesforce
Hear it from Salesforce
See how Fantasy re-platformed and redesigned Salesforce.com around a unified design system and a custom CMS, turning a fragmented web presence into a customer-centric, conversion-driven site that grew SEO traffic, leads, and pipeline.
What should you take from this if your digital ecosystem is fragmented?
Fragmentation comes from distributed publishing without shared standards. Fix how the organization publishes, or the redesign decays on the same schedule as the last one.
The people closest to the content are structurally unable to see it with a beginner's mind. That outside view is a large part of what a partner is for.
An authorable platform with opinionated components keeps improving after launch. A set of beautiful pages starts aging at launch.
Give teams ownership and tools, and let the system enforce quality. Central review queues collapse under enterprise content volume.
Salesforce tracked the replatform through to form completions, chat sessions, inbound calls, pipeline, and ACV. Measurement at that depth keeps a multiyear program accountable and funded.
Frequently asked questions
The Salesforce replatform ran from 2020 to 2025, covering strategy, research, information architecture, design system, product design, and a phased migration of content. By the end, 85% of salesforce.com webpages flowed through the new platform. Timelines scale with the number of properties, products, and publishing teams involved.
An authorable design system lets non-engineering teams build and update pages, and even navigation, through standard components and authoring tools instead of hard-coded templates. Salesforce's PageBuilder platform applies this model: distributed teams publish independently while the system enforces brand and quality standards.
PageBuilder is Salesforce's custom CMS. Fantasy brought the system concept, design language, and component architecture during the salesforce.com replatform; Salesforce's internal engineering team built and owns the platform.
Salesforce reported substantial organic search traffic growth, higher conversion of that traffic into form completions, chat sessions, and inbound calls, and downstream growth in leads, pipeline, and annual contract value, with 85% of webpages flowing through the new platform.
On salesforce.com, Fantasy led experience strategy, research, information architecture, UX and UI design, the design system, content strategy, and motion, working with hundreds of Salesforce stakeholders. Platform engineering remained with Salesforce's internal team.