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Swarm Labs

Swarm Labs is a UK software studio (an “application studio & automation lab”) that designs and builds high-performance applications and online platforms, on a mission to recover one million hours of human effort. Their portfolio spans visitor intelligence (Scout), infrastructure control (Apiary), nursery management (Little Bees), image generation (SwarmGen) and more, each built and maintained in-house.
Swarm Labs 1

Overview

Swarm Labs, the software studio behind products like Scout, Apiary and SwarmGen, asked Spotlight to design and run their new home at swarmlabs.io. They build the applications; our job was everything around them: a brand that ties the family together, a website fast enough to be its own sales pitch, and hosting that keeps it that way without anyone having to think about it.

Client Intro

Swarm Labs is a UK software studio (an “application studio & automation lab”) that designs and builds high-performance applications and online platforms, on a mission to recover one million hours of human effort. Their portfolio spans visitor intelligence (Scout), infrastructure control (Apiary), nursery management (Little Bees), image generation (SwarmGen) and more, each built and maintained in-house.

Challenges

Swarm Labs needed a site that could keep up with the software it presents:

  • An identity worthy of the products: the old website couldn’t express the studio’s personality, and each product had its own look with no family resemblance.
  • Speed as proof: a studio that sells fast software can’t open with a slow website. The old homepage kept visitors waiting nearly two seconds before the main content appeared.
  • Hundreds of pages to be found: the site’s application and integration pages needed to keep appearing in Google searches and, increasingly, in the answers AI assistants give.
  • Show, don’t tell: each product had to be demonstrated on the page itself, without slow video embeds weighing everything down.
Animated preview of the swarmlabs.io homepage design

Solution

Spotlight designed the brand and rebuilt the site from the ground up:

  • A cinematic hive identity: near-black pages, a rose-to-violet signature gradient and honeycomb motifs carry the “swarm” theme through every page, opening with a living particle swarm on the homepage.
  • Pages prepared in advance: all 371 pages are built ahead of time and stored on Cloudflare’s worldwide network, so every visitor gets an instant page from a location near them, and there’s no central server to slow down, crash or break into.
  • Products that demonstrate themselves: every application is shown as a hand-built animated miniature of its real screen. Nothing to download, and no screenshots to go out of date.
  • Built to be found: an integrations directory of nearly 200 applications, tuned for Google and for the new generation of AI assistants alike.
Animated diagram of how swarmlabs.io is built and served: an update is published, Cloudflare prepares every page in advance, and 371 ready-made pages are served instantly worldwide, with images and search-friendly content from the edge.

Results

The new swarmlabs.io scores a perfect 100 for both search visibility and accessibility in Google’s Lighthouse tests, and pages appear almost instantly wherever in the world they’re opened from. The design system now stretches across the whole product family; the same hive look and feel appears in every Swarm Labs product site we’ve designed since. Most importantly, the site finally works as the studio’s best case study: it demonstrates the very qualities it describes.

Support

Spotlight continues to look after everything behind swarmlabs.io, from the domain and hosting to the security, alongside Managed Website Hosting and support across the wider Swarm Labs product fleet. Design and infrastructure by Spotlight Studios; applications by Swarm Labs.