62 Percent Boost in Conversion through Performance Optimization
Introduction
A High-Performance Computing (HPC) solution provider for big data challenges in academia, research laboratories, government, and commercial sectors approached us to audit their site. They integrated the right combination of products and services into their existing infrastructure to serve their customers but the website was not well optimized for Search Engines.
Pain Areas
The site delivers tailored HPC solutions using six steps holistic approach from requirement gathering until product delivery and installation. There were many product pages displayed on the site. Some of the product page links were throwing 50x internal error due to server memory limitation. This caused the website to miss out on competition in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). There were many pages with for which the response time exceeded 15 seconds. The website was maintaining the older version of contributed plugins in WordPress. This was blocking the scripts, which in turn affected the loading time of the page. Another major problem was that the site was not designed for handheld devices, this caused the website to lose the traffic from that of handheld devices.
Technology Used
- Wordpress CMS
- PHP
- MySQL
Approach
The main aim was to enhance the site's digital presence and thereby bring relevant traffic to the website. We began by auditing the website and did a detailed analysis on this. Based on our analysis insight we started working on optimizing the site.
An Intercom chat system was integrated to target and interact with visitors and help these visitors. The SEO plugins were enabled to make the website search engine friendly and also optimized the load time of the website to improve overall performance. The website was facing an internal server memory limitation issue, which was resolved and the server migrated from shared hosting to VPS hosting.
The website was not optimally designed for handheld devices. The look and feel of the website was not really appealing. We fixed the theme level issues and made it responsive.
Solution and Result
The theme was revamped in a way that it did not affect the existing look and feel of the user interface. The existing website was made responsive and cross-browser compatible thus making it more SEO friendly. The structure of inner pages was changed for better search compatibility.
Four months of digital marketing effort resulted in significant improvement in performance. The client started receiving genuine queries through chat systems. The number of form submissions in the website improved to 62%. Overall traffic of the website improved to 22%. Search visibility of the website improved, ranking in the first and second pages of the SERP for many keywords.
A better solution for making the website more Search Engine friendly, would have been to implement more customizable features in the admin section where administrator/ editor of the website could easily handle SEO titles and other features.
