Site Education
NIODA
An institute that teaches how organisations work, with a WordPress site only one person could edit. We rebuilt it so its staff publish their own changes, and every page appears on screen before the old one had even started to show.
- Client
- Postgraduate institute, Melbourne
- Industry
- Education
- Shipped
- 2025
- Live at
- nioda.org.au
Before
Ten seconds a page, and one person who could change it.
NIODA, the National Institute of Organisation Dynamics Australia, teaches leaders and consultants how organisations really work: a master's degree, a graduate diploma and certificate, a PhD, workshops, events and a growing body of research. The website ran on WordPress with a drag-and-drop page builder. Every page had been assembled by hand, so there was no template to follow, and every page took ten seconds or more to load.
Only one person could safely change it, and that person was the CEO. A new event, a staff bio, a symposium programme: all of it had to wait for one person.
What we built · 01
A site the whole team can edit.
The site is built with SvelteKit, with every page generated in advance, and hosted on Cloudflare. Staff edit it in CloudCannon, a visual editor. Instead of hand-built pages, there are six collections, each with its own fields: pages, faculty and staff, insights, events, theses and site data. The team builds pages visually from 40 page sections and sees changes as they type. Courses share the same details, pricing and what-to-expect blocks, so a new workshop looks like the rest without anyone designing it.
Staff profiles are proper records: qualifications, teaching, consulting practice, research and publications, with every insight linked to its author. Events carry their sessions in Melbourne time, their programmes and their own FAQs, and sort into upcoming and past automatically.
What we built · 02
Handed over before launch.
NIODA staff were editing in CloudCannon less than two weeks into the build, well before launch, so the handover was done by the time the site went live. Since then, the team has published its own changes, and nothing waits for the CEO any more.
Images are stored and resized on Cloudflare. Search runs from an index built with the site, so it needs no search server. And redirects keep every old WordPress address working.
Before and after
Same institute, new site.
The old page-builder homepage next to the new one. The numbers are for the new site only, because the old one is gone. The ten seconds is how long the old site took when we first looked at it.
Before 
After
GTmetrix grade
- After
- A
Performance score
- After
- 98
Page starts to show
- After
- 656ms
Fully loaded
- After
- 788ms
GTmetrix, September 2026, homepage. The WordPress site cannot be measured again.
What changed
The numbers.
0.8s
fully loaded
the WordPress site took ten seconds or more a page
40
page sections
courses, events, programmes and profiles built from the same editable blocks
Speed from GTmetrix, September 2026. Page sections counted from the build.
Runs on
No lock-in.
The site sits in NIODA's own CloudCannon and Cloudflare accounts. Every course, event, profile and insight is a file in their own code repository, so the content can move to any system that reads a folder of files.
- SvelteKit
the site, with pages built in advance
- CloudCannon
six collections, edited visually by NIODA staff
- Cloudflare
hosting, image storage and image resizing
- Pagefind
search, rebuilt with every update
- JotForm
enrolment and contact forms, embedded
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