Discover how Greyhound Studio built a bespoke website and voting process for the BRAVO Awards, helping Brighton’s most prestigious restaurant award increase their vote count by 239%.

The problem

The original BRAVO site had been built on Drupal using off-the-shelf components, including an outdated and cumbersome social media login system. When support for their version of Drupal ended, BRAVO saw an opportunity to overhaul their site.

Key issues included:

• Limited flexibility: The off-the-shelf Drupal setup offered limited support and customisation options, forcing BRAVO to adapt their voting process to fit the available tools rather than the other way around.
• A clunky user experience: Voters were required to log in via social media to cast their votes, raising privacy concerns and deterring participation. 

The solution

To boost engagement, simplify the voting process, and prevent fraudulent votes, Greyhound Studio designed and built a bespoke WordPress site with a strong focus on an intuitive and secure user experience. We first migrated the Drupal site content and data to WordPress, then designed the site in Elementor with custom-built features and voting logic. 

Some of the new site’s key features include:

• User-friendly navigation: User experience and design updates made it easier for voters to browse by category, cast their vote, and receive confirmation that their vote has been counted.
• Secure and verified login and voting: Instead of the inconvenience of a social media login, voters are now asked to enter only their email address and opt into the BRAVO newsletter if they choose to. They are then sent a confirmation email with a verification link to prove they are a real person and prevent duplicate votes. Additionally, we included a range of security measures to protect the votes.
• Seamless, pick-up-and-go voting: Once verified, the site remembers the user’s device, allowing users to vote across multiple categories over a period of time without having to log in or verify their accounts again.
• Improved performance: The way the site has been built, along with custom caching, ensures fast loading times even during peak voting traffic without having to invest in unnecessary hosting upgrades.
• Marketing support: We built a QR code generator into the site, allowing restaurants to promote themselves, further driving traffic and voter engagement.
• Admin tools: We built tools that allow BRAVO to pull real-time vote counts, export their data, and conveniently manage their newsletter sign-ups.

Our bespoke site upgrades made the voting process more intuitive, secure, and scalable—perfectly aligning with BRAVO’s goals and their voters’ expectations.

The results

Having more than tripled the number of votes cast since 2022 and continuing to see steady year-on-year growth, both our client and our team agree that we have made a measurable and lasting impact on the BRAVO Awards.

Number of votes

Between 2017 and 2020, the BRAVO Awards grew from 24,000 to 30,700 votes per year, representing a modest increase of 27%. While the pandemic essentially shut the BRAVOs down for 2021, since relaunching in 2022 with Greyhound Studio, their numbers increased from a 21,500 to just under 73,000 in 2025, a 239% increase over the same amount of time. We look forward to breaking 80k+ votes in 2026.

Traffic handling

Anticipating large traffic volumes over the voting period, Greyhound Studio hosted the BRAVO site in-house. The new voting site successfully handled traffic spikes of more than 100,000 unique visitors and 240,000 unique page views during the voting window—without a single instance of downtime. Learn more about our WordPress Hosting Services.

Beyond just the numbers, our efforts have made the BRAVO Awards a bigger part of the Brighton restaurant and hospitality industry. The site inspires trust in the process, makes it harder to cast fraudulent votes, and is built in a way that makes it easier for the organisers to manage the awards, engage with the voting public, and scale as the BRAVOs continue to grow.