How Greenhouse transformed their site into a marketing-owned growth engine with Webflow

Company Context

Greenhouse helps over 7,000 companies hire with precision and purpose. As a brand built around the idea that hiring is a transformational, high-trust activity, Greenhouse takes seriously every impression their website makes on buyers evaluating a new platform and job seekers navigating their next career move.

For a company whose mission is "making hiring work for everyone," the website goes beyond a marketing asset. It's a growth engine, a brand expression, and the primary channel through which nearly every piece of new and existing business passes. When your business is about connecting companies with the people who will shape their future, your digital front door matters.

But for years, greenhouse.com was managed through a custom-built CMS stack that the team owned end to end — from servers and caching to firewalls and API key rotation. The result was a site that performed reliably but couldn't keep pace with a marketing team running at full speed. 

Content updates were manageable. But anything requiring a change to a template or component required so much technical maintenance that it went into a developer queue and was always second priority to keeping the site live. The website had to change. And so did the way the team worked.

When the website becomes the bottleneck

"We were really in a position where a lot of our budget and resources were fully dedicated to just maintaining the technology versus doing things that are accruing to marketing."— Trenton Kanegy, VP of Marketing, Greenhouse

In Greenhouse's previous Craft CMS environment, even minor design changes like adjusting a color or expanding a font size required developer involvement. Nothing could happen on the design team alone, and simple updates could take one to two weeks to ship because they were second priority to technical tasks. 

The marketing web team owned everything: servers, the CMS, the database, caching, and firewall. As Trenton put it, the team was "in the IT business."

Routine maintenance tasks — rotating API keys, updating platform versioning, applying security patches — consistently took priority over actual marketing work. The infrastructure even required something the team called "Dynamos" — dynamic servers they had to manually activate when the site started responding slowly during traffic spikes. 

"We had to go flip a switch in a hosting environment just to keep the site live," Trenton recalled. "It feels so archaic now."

A typical request moved from campaign team to design to web production to web dev agency, with scoping and scheduling at each step. By the time something went live, months could pass. 

Even publishing required the partner agency's involvement, adding delay to what should have been a simple, internal action. When teams knew a non-standard request meant months of lead time, they stopped asking. Creative ambition was effectively self-censored by the limitations of the process.

"There were times we'd get a request from our VP or CMO to make a quick update to an important page and we were unable to do so immediately. That was frustrating — not being able to make what seemed like simple updates without communicating with our partner agency." — Zaire Fletcher, Senior Digital Producer, Greenhouse

Choosing Webflow and the right partner 

"There was something that clicked — this isn't sustainable. We had all these issues around the lack of ability to be agile, and the retainer was becoming one of our largest agency costs. What if we applied the Webflow model we had for campaigns to our whole website?" — Trenton Kanegy, VP of Marketing, Greenhouse

The path to Webflow started with campaign landing pages. Greenhouse had already been using Webflow for standalone campaign pages and those pages essentially ran themselves. 

No platform tickets, no maintenance requests, no agency involvement. The growth team was self-sufficient. That experience planted the seed: what if the entire .com could work that way?

Before committing, Greenhouse's security and legal teams conducted a full vendor assessment. They evaluated localization capabilities for multiple global regions, confirmed that existing custom integrations (including a partner integration update system) could carry over, and verified that Webflow Optimize would be natively consolidated. Every box got checked.

The migration itself was a deliberate, strategic partnership with HappyCog, a long-tenured agency partner and Certified Webflow Enterprise Partner. Together, they migrated over 1,000 pages, including a large resources library, static pages, and a complex component system, with a planned timeline of four to six months.

HappyCog's role was critical. They started with a deep discovery audit that mapped out every piece of existing functionality and identified what to keep, what to rethink, and where Webflow's native capabilities could replace custom server-side work. From there, they programmatically migrated thousands of CMS items and built out a full component library. Most importantly, they trained the Greenhouse team as they went, ensuring marketers were enabled to make changes in the future.

A key principle guided the build: don't engineer around Webflow. 

The team intentionally chose to rebuild components natively, even when that meant changing existing approaches, to ensure they could take full advantage of future roadmap features. The result? Zero site interruption during the migration. No disruption to an active demand generation channel. A seamless transition that immediately unlocked a new way of working.

"HappyCog was critical to our success. They knew our site, they knew how our marketing team worked, and they helped build a design system that was easy for us to manage — and easy to make fast changes in. We would not have been as successful without them." — Zaire Fletcher, Senior Digital Producer, Greenhouse

The three-way collaboration worked because each party brought something essential.

1. Webflow's platform provided the enterprise-grade infrastructure and design flexibility Greenhouse needed as the technical foundation. 
2. Greenhouse brought deep knowledge of their brand and what their marketers actually needed day to day. 
3. HappyCog bridged the gap by translating business goals into a scalable build and making sure nothing got lost in the migration.

What changed operationally

The impact of moving to Webflow was cultural just as much as it was technical. The way the Greenhouse marketing team operates now has fundamentally changed.

More people publishing than ever

Previously, publishing greenhouse.com sat primarily with site production and the engineering team. Now, product marketers, content writers, copywriters, field marketers, and designers are all actively publishing and updating the site directly, without routing through production.

Waterfall replaced by parallel collaboration

Teams no longer pass work sequentially from design to copy to production. Everyone works concurrently inside Webflow, commenting, tagging, reviewing, and publishing in one place.

Collections unlock safe autonomy

Webflow's collections allow marketers to update content within a defined design system without risking breaking anything and without needing QA from production. Blog posts, resource articles, and product updates can go live immediately.

Event pages in half the time

Building an event page used to take two weeks. With Webflow templates and parallel collaboration, it now takes a few hours.

Smarter, faster standard updates

For standard page updates and new pages, the team is moving roughly twice as fast as before, with stakeholder coordination happening live on the page rather than scattered across Slack, copy docs, and project management tools.

Less agency dependency for simple changes

For basic component updates, animations, and design iterations, the team no longer needs to route through a partner agency. Those changes happen internally, on demand. HappyCog remains active for ongoing complex development work like advanced components, custom JavaScript, analytics, and SEO, so as Greenhouse keeps growing, the site grows with them.

"What it feels like now is everyone is an owner on the marketing site. Everyone feels a part of publishing to greenhouse.com. That's a new way of working for us — and it's a better way of working." — Zaire Fletcher, Senior Digital Producer, Greenhouse

Testing, optimization, and a future built for the agentic era

Before Webflow, A/B testing required multiple people, multiple platforms, and carefully synchronized execution. Now, with Webflow Optimize natively integrated, Greenhouse's conversion rate optimization work happens in a single platform and the results are measurable.

CRO is now largely self-serve. The conversion optimization lead can build, launch, and monitor tests without pulling in the web team for every step. 

The web team is no longer the bottleneck. The team is testing layout, form placement, field counts, customer logos, component placement, and CTA positioning with real-time data informing every decision.

On one of Greenhouse's most business-critical pages — demo requests — optimization work has driven up to a 40% improvement in conversion rates.

Design decisions grounded in behavior. Heat maps and scroll data from Webflow Analyze give the design and web teams a shared, objective view of how users actually interact with pages, shifting stakeholder conversations from opinion to evidence.

"There are two indicators of value from Webflow. First, speed to value — the transition was seamless and we experienced no interruption in our business. Second, efficiency and productivity — I no longer hear about the bottlenecks that used to come from the website not keeping pace." — Carin Van Vuuren, Chief Marketing Officer, Greenhouse

The tangible business outcomes tell the story clearly: roughly twice as fast execution on standard page updates and new page builds, event pages delivered in one week instead of two, and 40% conversion rate improvement on demo request pages. Zero site interruption during migration was critical for a site at the center of Greenhouse's pipeline. 

The efficiency gains are qualitative but meaningful. The CMO noted that the team is no longer regularly hitting bottlenecks that prevent campaigns from moving forward. Site health and performance improved across the board: pages load faster, infrastructure maintenance is off the team's plate entirely, and the team has eliminated the need to manually manage server capacity during traffic spikes.

What's next: Building for the agentic future

Greenhouse has positioned itself to take on a new class of marketing challenges — ones that weren't even on the roadmap when they were managing server infrastructure.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

With organic traffic shifting toward AI-driven search and LLM-powered discovery, the team is investing in schema markup, AI-readable content structures, and content strategies built for bots as much as browsers. Webflow's native schema tools are central to this effort.

"The future of web marketing is agentic, and I think Webflow really sets us up for success with that." — Trenton Kanegy, VP of Marketing, Greenhouse

International expansion and localization

Gone are the concerns about how long it takes to build a regional site. Greenhouse is expanding localized experiences across multiple markets with confidence in the platform's flexibility.

Deeper CRO and personalization

The team is running smarter, more frequent tests — and building a tighter loop between design, content, and conversion data.

Animation and motion design

The team is excited to move beyond Lottie animations into GSAP — creating more dynamic, engaging experiences that keep users on the site longer.

More team members in Webflow

The goal is to continue democratizing the site — getting more non-technical contributors building and publishing independently, reducing every remaining bottleneck.

"Nothing feels impossible anymore. It feels like, 'Oh, we could probably do this in Webflow.' And that's what's super exciting for our team." — Zaire Fletcher, Senior Digital Producer, Greenhouse

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