The Challenge

The Archdiocese of New York — one of the most prominent Catholic institutions in the United States — was running on a WordPress site that had grown unwieldy. A small communications team struggled with a backend that made even routine updates painful. Content was scattered, the parish finder barely worked, and the site's structure didn't reflect how people actually came to it for help.

The goal was a single, modern platform that could serve seekers, parishioners, press, and internal staff all at once — on an aggressive timeline.

The Approach

Highland built the new archny.org on Craft CMS, chosen for its flexibility with complex content structures and its intuitive editing experience. The team worked closely with the Archdiocese's communications staff through weekly meetings over a four-month build cycle, moving from discovery and wireframing through content migration, design implementation, and launch.

Posts, events, pages, and news stories all live in one system — searchable, cross-referenced, and manageable by a small team.

Key Features

• AI-Powered Virtual Agent. An always-present conversational assistant built on Highland's Unvarnished platform helps visitors navigate a large, complex site. The agent draws from the full site content indexed in Typesense and validates responses through Magisterium for Catholic teaching adherence. It includes safety guardrails — flagged terms trigger appropriate responses, and conversations that need human follow-up can be forwarded to staff.
• Parish and Service Finder. A rebuilt finder with location-based search, fuzzy matching, and the ability to tag parishes with recurring events and services. Users can search for parishes, schools, and Catholic services across the ten counties of the Archdiocese.
• Content Migration at Scale. Highland migrated hundreds of pages, posts, events, and files from multiple legacy WordPress installations, preserving original permalinks through redirects.
• Flexible Page Building. A block-based content system lets the communications team build diverse page layouts — timelines, accordions, feature cards with animated backgrounds, FAQ sections, popup modules — without developer involvement. Internal HR pages are flagged to exclude from search and the AI agent.

The Outcome

The new archny.org launched on schedule in early 2026, replacing the legacy WordPress site with zero downtime. The communications team — previously bottlenecked by a difficult backend — now manages the full site, events, and parish content from a single Craft CMS installation. The AI virtual agent handles a significant volume of visitor inquiries, routing people to the right pages and reducing the load on staff. Highland continues to support the site through ongoing development, including form builder enhancements, content strategy refinements, and performance optimization.

Live Site: archny.org