Helping entrepreneurs find support to start their business and stay focused on their vision, not the paperwork.
CorpNet helps new businesses file the critical but often frustrating and time-consuming paperwork to start their business and stay compliant in all 50 states. They have helped over 100,000 businesses form, but a key part of their continued growth is ensuring that new customers can find their services and seamlessly sign up. CorpNet Inc. partnered with SymSoft to upgrade their WordPress-powered website and improve page speed performance and accessibility in order to improve overall user experience and Google Search ranking.
Web Performance is critical for business.
Website speed correlates to business metrics. For example, conversion rates at walmart.com decline as load times increase. The average site load speed is significantly lower for the converted population (3.22 seconds) than the non-converted population (6.03 seconds).
Google Search uses website speed performance as a signal when ranking websites. It is not the most important Google Search signal, but, all else being equal, faster websites are ranked better.
When you’re excited to start your business, the last thing you want to do is wait for the web page to load.
Challenges
- The website had grown organically over time with features and functionality layered on top of outdated WordPress infrastructure. The institutional knowledge and sparse documentation resulted in a bloated system that was difficult to maintain and update to serve the customer and business needs.
- The end solution needed to integrate with custom-developed eCommerce and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
- Marketing and sales specialists needed access to publish content and manage workflows without compromising the site’s high performance, uninterrupted data exchange, or user-friendly interface.
What We Did
We collaborated with the CorpNet team of partners to update the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) enabling content owners to publish content but also configure and manage marketing and sales tools without relying on IT support.
User-friendly content management features and a careful selection of WordPress plug-ins empowers business users to attract leads, close sales, and retain existing customers.
We deployed the website on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, using a suite of AWS tools such as LightSail. The website performance improvements included increased loading speed and reliability when hundreds of concurrent visitors access the website.
Outcomes
- Optimized for Speed. The pages load under 2 seconds for new visitors and even faster for the repeat visitors thanks to the extremely optimized Content Delivery Network (CDN), web server, and front-end code.
- User-centered. The implemented features are convenient and intuitive. Different web forms and wizards are automatically personalized for the logged in customers.
- Shorter time to publish. CorpNet’s marketing specialists independently manage content and features using a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and a library of prebuilt components.
Project Highlights
Maximizing speed to increase customer conversion.
Fast loading sites have higher customer conversion rates, better search engine rankings, and tend to have higher traffic. By combining WordPress CMS and Amazon Web Services best practices, we were able to accomplish an extremely fast page loading speed and website availability. The image shows a Google Lighthouse test with all four metrics — Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO achieving excellent scores.
How to Measure a Page Loading Speed
Open a website in an Incognito window in Google Chrome. Right-click anywhere on the page. Select Inspect and then select the Lighthouse tab. In the Lighthouse tab, select desired options. Tap or click the Generate Report button.
(Noter: other Internet traffic on your device may impact the score.)
Easy to add and update pages to stay on brand.
All interface components and page layouts can be reused in a number of combinations. Upon testing all design elements with the final content, we provided components and layouts to business users in the Divi Library. These reusable components will empower the business users that maintain the site to modify and create new pages in alignment with the updated brand. A consistent design library reduces the cognitive load on your customers.
Offering customers the personalized experience they expect across the buying journey with WordPress plug-ins.
We included a suite of additional functionality to enable cross-website communication with CorpNet’s eCommerce and Customer Relationship Management solutions. For example, users that are logged in to the eCommerce solution interact with personalized — instead of generic — web forms on the marketing website. This was accomplished by replacing the WordPress Ninja forms with Gravity forms for lead-generating interactions such as the Start a Business and Run a Business call-to-action bars.
Speed and reliability delivered by scalable system architecture using Amazon Web Services
The new CorpNet website is powered by a powerful infrastructure which combines WordPress ease-of-use with fast and reliable Amazon Web Services.
AWS LightSail
AWS LightSail is the managed hosting for WordPress that utilizes standard AWS features including reliability and security but also load balancing for variable traffic and uninterrupted user experience.
AWS CloudFront
AWS CloudFront for caching (efficient high-speed page retrieval) optimizes website performance by reducing the App Services load.