Christie & Co that buys and sells businesses to corporate and independent clients in the hospitality, retail, medical and healthcare sectors, were looking for strong Kentico expertise to adopt their mobile first search solution and take ownership of future development.
During initial workshops together, the Ridgeway team identified the need to improve Christie & Co’s performance, increase traffic and provide key functionality their customers and prospects required from the site.
Tim Moxon, IT Director, Christie & Co highlighted:
Our website was slow, inefficient and holding our business back. Ridgeway very quickly got to grips with some major issues and within weeks they had significantly improved its performance and saved us an incredible £4,000 a month!
The Adoption
Christie & Co came to Ridgeway as their Kentico website was not performing and it was having a negative impact on their business. They selected Ridgeway as a Kentico Gold Partner to adopt their solution, improve its technical performance and take on further development to improve the user experience.
One of the first improvements was focussed on optimising their Azure platform. Ridgeway quickly identified a large amount of redundant infrastructure and were able to streamline their whole solution reducing their hosting costs by £4,000 a month as well as improving efficiencies.
A Better User Experience
The Ridgeway UX and Design Team completed a full assessment of the Christie website in order to put forward a proposal of recommendations. Based on criteria outlined by the Christie team, and exploration of proto-personas to identify user needs.
Ridgeway focused on enhancements to the user journeys to provide a more seamless experience. Key areas were identified as UX priorities which included the homepage, mobile optimisation, business search and account registration forms.
Home Improvements
As the main landing page, the homepage was obviously a priority. Previously the homepage was very slow to load as it featured a large carousel, and this was affecting its performance.
Ridgeway stripped it back and reshaped the UI to give a much clearer focused homepage which enables users to understand and be directed to the primary function of the site – the Business Search functionality. Features such as predictive search and quick search options have been added to provide clients with a more straightforward and easier journey.
Enhancing the Mobile Experience
It was known that 52% of the site’s traffic came from mobile (40%) and tablet (12%), however people viewed less pages and spent less time on the site therefore improving the mobile experience was a high priority.
Speed was a major issue, pages were taking too long to load and using too much data. By adopting a mobile-first search solution, Ridgeway were able to improve the site’s performance which in turn will help to improve its authority in search engines.
Search Made Simple
The business search was the second most viewed page on the site but it was hard to navigate and time consuming for users to get to the information they needed.
Several improvements were made to make the search more usable and frictionless including filters, featured properties, bulleted details for properties on sale, users can set up alerts if interested in sold properties and clear calls-to-actions that upsold the other Christie and Co businesses.
Easy Sign up
Christie & Co wanted to increase the number of returning visitors, but the account registration process was long and complex and the benefits were not clearly stated.
Ridgeway now focuses users towards the benefits of an account while not overloading a form with unnecessary questions, that was discouraging sign ups by trying to cover too much detail. They are now capturing key details needed and allowing the user to manage the content Christie & Co wants to receive within a personalised account area.
Results
The figures below compare the two-week period after the site improvements went live with the two weeks before:
• 70% decrease in homepage load time
• 121% increase in pageviews of the business search
• 27% increase in account registrations
In just two weeks the improvements have made a big impact thanks to its mobile first search solution. The homepage is significantly faster to load therefore improving user experience on desktop and mobile. The pageviews of the business search have increased and the page exits decreased by 21% demonstrating that people are a lot more engaged and finding the search function easier to use. The number of account registrations increased from 460 to 582 indicating that users are finding the sign-up process more compelling and easier to complete.
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