Delivery Standards & Acceptance Criteria

Our delivery standards align with the acceptance criteria outlined by Urban List, focusing on performance, accessibility, SEO foundations, analytics readiness and operational governance.

Performance, accessibility and user experience are treated as foundational requirements rather than post-launch optimisation tasks. These considerations influence decisions throughout the design and development process, from component design and template structure to caching and infrastructure choices.

Baseline browser support

While not explicitly referenced in the RFP, we recommend defining browser support expectations early in the project.

Our approach typically follows the Baseline Widely Available browser feature standard, ensuring the platform works reliably across the majority of modern browsers used by Urban List’s audience.

Where newer platform features fall into Baseline Newly Available, we implement graceful fallbacks or polyfills to maintain a consistent experience.

Learn more about Baseline browser standards:
https://web.dev/baseline

Performance

Newism places a strong emphasis on performance. Urban List’s audience expects a fast, responsive experience across devices, and performance plays a significant role in search visibility, engagement and conversion.

Performance testing strategy

We will continue testing the platform under multiple performance scenarios to understand the impact of caching and third-party scripts:

1. No third-party scripts, fresh cache
2. No third-party scripts, primed cache
3. Third-party scripts enabled, fresh cache
4. Third-party scripts enabled, primed cache

Under optimal conditions (no third-party scripts and a primed cache) our engineering target is to achieve 95+ PageSpeed Insights scores on both mobile and desktop for key URLs, while maintaining strong Core Web Vitals performance:

• LCP: ≤ 1 second
• INP: ≤ 100 ms
• CLS: ≤ 0

These targets exceed the RFP benchmarks (LCP ≤ 2.5s, INP ≤ 200ms, CLS ≤ 0.1), reflecting our commitment to performance as a competitive differentiator for Urban List.

We recognise that third-party scripts — particularly advertising and analytics integrations — can affect performance. Because these integrations are essential to Urban List’s commercial model, we work closely with the team to ensure they are implemented in ways that minimise layout shifts, blocking scripts and runtime overhead.

Caching strategy

The existing website uses Varnish caching, and the new platform will implement a caching strategy that delivers similar or improved performance.

Options include:

• continuing with Varnish or a comparable reverse-proxy cache
• leveraging CDN-based edge caching such as CloudFront
• cache-aware template and component design

Caching strategies will account for both anonymous and logged-in users.

Image performance

Images represent a significant portion of page weight on editorial platforms. We therefore treat the image pipeline as a core part of performance engineering rather than a post-launch optimisation.

Our approach includes:

• automatic generation of responsive image variants
• modern image formats such as WebP and AVIF
• lazy loading for below-the-fold media
• CDN edge caching for frequently requested assets
• consistent image sizing rules aligned with the design system

Craft CMS provides strong native support for responsive image transformations, allowing templates to generate appropriately sized images for different breakpoints while avoiding unnecessary payload.

Combined with CDN delivery and strong caching policies, this approach ensures that image-heavy pages such as articles and listings remain fast and responsive across mobile and desktop devices.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a core requirement of the platform and is built into the design system and development standards from the outset.

Our approach includes:

• accessibility-conscious component design
• semantic HTML structure and keyboard-accessible interactions
• accessible colour contrast and focus states
• support for user preferences such as prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-contrast

Accessibility validation is performed through a combination of automated tooling and manual testing.

Tools commonly used include:

• Axe DevTools
• Screaming Frog accessibility reporting

Testing focuses on key templates and flows such as articles, directories, search results, membership sign-up and dashboards.

Technical SEO foundation

Newism has extensive experience supporting and improving Urban List’s technical SEO foundation.

In the proposed platform:

• SEO will be managed through the SEOmatic plugin for Craft CMS
• structured schema will be implemented for relevant content types
• canonical URL handling will ensure consistent indexing
• robots and indexing rules will control dynamic or faceted pages
• XML sitemaps will be generated automatically
• SEO-friendly URL structures following current best practice

We will also implement a comprehensive redirect strategy to preserve search visibility during the migration.

Tracking, analytics and data layer

The platform will include a structured data layer compatible with Google Tag Manager and GA4.

Our approach focuses on maintaining continuity with Urban List’s existing analytics framework while improving consistency and documentation.

This includes:

• a clean event naming framework
• documented tracking specifications
• tracking hooks for key user interactions such as search, memberships, listings and conversions

All analytics events and tracking logic will be documented in a shared workspace such as Confluence or Notion to support future development and reporting.

We will also ensure continuity with Urban List’s existing Looker reporting infrastructure, including location-level reporting currently used by the business.

Governance and moderation

Craft CMS provides strong governance and moderation capabilities through its permission and workflow systems.

These include:

• group-based editorial permissions
• revision history and publishing controls
• moderation queues for user-submitted listings or claims
• audit trails for content and configuration changes (specific requirements to be confirmed with Urban List)

Where additional workflow control is required, we can implement approval processes using the Workflow plugin for Craft CMS.

Reporting and export

Urban List’s internal reporting capability will continue to be supported and can be extended where required.

Our analytics specialist Penny can assist with developing additional reporting dashboards and data analysis using Looker. Partner-facing reporting can also be created in Looker Studio from analytics data where required.

Content can be exported through:

• CSV exports from the CMS
• Craft CMS’s GraphQL API for programmatic access

RSS feeds can also be provided for key content types to support syndication and integrations with external platforms.

Warranty and support

Post-launch support will include:

• an agreed defect resolution period
• defined support SLAs
• editorial and administrative training sessions
• handover documentation covering the CMS, infrastructure and workflows

Formal acceptance will be based on successful completion of agreed testing, performance validation and documentation delivery.