Zone Manager – a software firm from Redditch – have been struggling to gain inquiries through their website despite spending significant money on SEO and web development in the past. They came to Little Fire Digital.
About Zone Manager
Zone Manager is the author of the eponymous Delivery Management System (DMS). A good DMS makes construction sites and other businesses receiving goods safer, more secure and more carbon-efficient by ensuring the efficient use of limited loading and unloading areas.
Zone Manager software runs as a SAAS (Software As A Service) so is available to use on any internet-enabled device. Delivery drivers can register, book a slot on their phone and deliver on time. The recipient in turn, knows the delivery is coming and can assign staff to accept and process it.
They approached us for SEO, that’s good, we do SEO … but “HOLD YOUR HORSES!” we cried …
What?! What is More Important Than SEO?
Oh, so many things.
If you’re going to drive people to a site, you need to make sure there’s something worthwhile when they get there. Otherwise, you’ll drive your bounce rate through the roof. There is little loyalty on the web: annoy visitors the once, and they are unlikely to return.
Visitor numbers on their own just don’t matter. If 0% of people arriving at a website don’t engage with a site it makes no difference if there are 1,000 or 1,000,000 of them.
So What Did We Do?
As always, when engaging with a potential new client, we take time and review the website. Properly.
It’s not a quick process. We are not trying to find fault, but this time, our jaws really did drop. We were nervous – we genuinely thought we would offend the client, so negative were our observations. Zone Manager were in serious need of our website optimisation services.
But we kept in mind client’s desired outcome – the completion of the demo request form and couched everything in those terms and brought the guys on board.
… and?
We don’t wish to crow, but among the issues we uncovered were:
- On a mobile device, the main site navigation appeared on a white background. Fine. But the nav icon itself is white … so that’s 55% of users who can’t see the menu or use the site.
- An absolute shambles of page builders, at least two layered on top of each other. A page builder is a suite of software (or plugins) which, in the early days, made it easier to build rich graphical web pages in WordPress. Since the introduction of the WordPress Gutenberg Editor, you barely even need one. Neither page builder was a quick one and conflicts between the two were causing the page to load very slowly.
- A huge number of broken pages and pointless redirects, all in the sitemap. Google was being sent from pillar to post and the crawl budget was being wasted.
- The many layers of page builder meant the site was slow, with elements arriving on the page over several seconds. This Cumulative Layout Shift is itself a significant drag on SEO performance and, in this case, caused the “Request a Demo’’ button to make the page skid about wildly. This made for a disorienting experience for any user. When the customer finally got to the form on their phone, it was only half an inch wide and absolutely impossible to complete.
The user experience (UX) was horrible. We could go on, but that alone was enough to convince the client that we needed to make major changes.
So What Did We Do Then?
It started with a full audit of all the content. The site had been running for many years and the company had changed hands more than once. There were pages which were no longer relevant, pages which no longer existed, design experiments abandoned, pages which should have been articles and vice versa.
We worked closely with the Zone Manager team to work out what content was valuable, what had to go and what could work (with love). There were some frantic spreadsheet exchanges, all to make the site less confusing.
At the end of it we realised only some 20 web pages of the initial 85 were still in use.
Next, we set about trying to improve the user interface. But the problems were so deep that it made sense to start again.
WordPress has built-in tools for copying content – just the words and the photos from one installation to another – so we made a brand new website and brought over just the content we needed. No plugins, just the web pages, news articles and case studies.
We then ran some server magic to get rid of all the mess left by decades of WordPress edits and plugins.
Rebuilding the site didn’t take long; we have a trusted set of tools and the skills to implement them rapidly and consistently. Our WordPress website redesign services are well-honed.
The Site Went Live in April
The site occupies a quarter of the disk space it once did. It is faster; the links all go where they should. We have:
- Integrated the client’s preferred CMS, HubSpot
- Reduced the number of plugins by over two thirds
- Fixed the User Interface issues on desktop and mobile – the site is now fully responsive.
- Set up custom post types so that case studies are consistently formatted with a distinct design. This makes the site less confusing.
- Fixed the display of news and case study archives so that all links work throughout the site
- Matched the site to client’s brand guidelines
- Now the site makes sense, we’ve added on-site search for an improved user experience.
The site is already far faster and far better in terms of SEO than it was. It’s in the perfect state for ongoing improvements.
But, more importantly, the client no longer finds the site confusing … nor do their customers.
Zone Manager are Happy. Be More Zone Manager
Is your site confusing you? Are you worried that your visitors are getting lost? Is it time to spring clean your website?
Almost definitely, what harm can it do? SEO and website redesign projects often go hand in hand. We offer a free website review – book one, and let’s get started.