The Challenge
The site was built in Craft CMS which is extremely easy to maintain, with a plethora of features and page layout options. However, the CustomerGauge website came with its set of challenges: poor speed and performance, inconsistent user experience across the site, and backend coding issues.
The Solution
Technical Improvements
Nerder kicked things off by advising on how to best address a number of issues, including site speed issues and ongoing site management issues.
The site had been patched together over time, which left it difficult to manage and slower to load—two serious problems we wanted to fix immediately.
Nerder evaluated all redundant or similar site elements, consolidated them into global/shared elements, and optimized them for speed. For example, slow loading JQuery animations were replaced with native CSS & Javascript, wherever possible. The result? A dramatic increase in site speed and improved site management and maintainability.
UX Improvements
The homepage and other key landing pages were reworked in order to enhance user experience and increase engagement.
The blog was also significantly revamped, again to increase usability, introducing category tagging along with smart searching, giving the ability to drill down into topics and search within a search.
Auto-generating tables of contents were also added to the blog, providing an excellent overview for longer pieces of content, while also providing anchors to jump around within blog posts.
Content Migration
The team at CustomerGauge had to manually migrate blog posts from the old format to the new enhanced version. The process was unnecessarily long and inefficient.
Nerder created a way of adding the new page layout to the old one, linking the two. That way, CustomerGauge could upgrade posts at their own pace, with some posts displaying in the old format while upgraded posts displayed in the new format.
The Result
Website performance factors were through the roof in terms of website speed, optimization level, and engagement metrics. A faster and easy-to-use website means better SEO value over time.
Nerder wasn’t just able to fix glaring issues with the website; the team took on a proactive approach to identify potential issues, creating a seamless plan of action to fix aspects that were, directly and indirectly, affecting website performance.
