The need for a website redesign

In the fast-paced agency world where we dedicate all of our resources to our clients, we realised that to practice what you preach, you need to lead by example.

Delivering award-winning integrated marketing campaigns for our clients and not using our expertise to our own benefit may sound mad, but it’s the harsh reality of many businesses out there. So, we decided to rebuild our website properly with a sound strategy rather than patching the elements that needed to be fixed.

True to our values, this case study transparently reflects where we were performance-wise, what we achieved and how an ongoing marketing strategy can re-position even a well-established business to reach new audiences, so you can see what we could do for your own organisation.

The baseline

Whilst the old website was ranking really well for best practices and SEO, we had plenty to improve across overall performance and accessibility, both across desktop and mobile.

However, even though for SEO we had a 100/100 score, this was not really reflected in our visibility across Google results and AI overviews which not only was anecdotally reported but SEMRush backed up this finding too .

Working with the Elementor CMS presented its own issues: whilst it can certainly be a valid CMS for some organisations, the way it was implemented across our site didn’t allow for good responsiveness across devices, and some elements that were arguably visually attractive didn’t match industry best practices for accessibility and SEO.

As a result of responsibility changes at Arke over the years, internal marketing efforts became misaligned from business goals. As a consequence, the backend had become cluttered with a number of plugins whose purpose and functionality were unclear. This not only increased the need for constant updates and testing to ensure the site remained stable, but also introduced potential security warnings by having several unnecessary third-party applications installed for no apparent reason.

The brief

Arke’s old website had performance issues coming from a convoluted backend, built on WordPress, using Elementor as a CMS and a multitude of plugins, some of which were conflicting with each other.

The brief to our web developer was to create a clean-coded Arke Agency theme, with accessibility, SEO and UX best practices by design across devices to support our aim as an authoritative voice in the agency space leading to demand generation.

Combining custom-made blocks with WordPress’ native ones, we designed a dual brand language, based on the content of the site, with landing page layouts for our service pages and an editorial layout for our case studies and thought leadership articles.

We needed to revamp the entire UX across the site, simplifying the navigation for ease of use and more impactful communication of our services, results and thought-leadership.

Some of the main KPIs we set for the development were:

• Achieving at least a score of 95 on each category on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
• Be compliant with WCAG 2.2 accessibility requirements.
• Keep the project on time and on budget.

Strategy

Being a fully integrated agency means that we have strategic and creative resources at our disposal. We took the website redesign as an opportunity to refresh our brand, maintaining our values and our personality whilst also showing our professionalism and ability to deliver award-winning marketing work.

We stripped down the graphic noise to focus on substance, combining it with subtle animated elements to drive user engagement where we want it the most.

The project didn’t need just a new website; it included the design of an ongoing SEO strategy, a curated content development plan, precisely targeted lead-gen campaigns and the establishment of new systems for producing web assets.

Results

• Upon launching the site, we achieved 100 points in each of Google’s PageSpeed Insights sections: performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO. This represented an improvement of over 500% for some key pages across the website.

• Our content and digital PR strategy, which started before the new website went live, made us climb quickly on strategic keywords we were not ranking before, taking us to the first page of Google and gaining AI citations to increase our reach. Same as we do with our clients, this strategy is ongoing and will only get stronger with our ongoing optimisations.
• We reduced the backend plugins from 32 to 13 without compromising on any functionality and securing our website against potential vulnerabilities.
• With accessibility being one of the points we stressed the most during the design phase, we ensured to have zero critical issues before launch and 42/42 passed audits under WCAG 2.2 criteria.

Curious to talk about it?

A website is much more than the window display your organisation offers to the world. It has never been more critical to have a technically sound website, both to reach your audiences and remain visible where the conversations begin, especially in a highly competitive landscape, but also from a legal responsibility, as accessibility and privacy by design are requirements for any organisation in the UK with a website.

It’s not always necessary to do a complete website redesign as you may already have solid foundations that need to be strengthened with UX best practices so let us know what you would like to achieve so we can help you get there faster.

Our Brighton-based team of Arkenauts have developed and designed websites and marketing strategies for organisations across over 15 sectors, including ecommerce, travel, entertainment, education, and much more for many years. We’ve got the toolbox of solutions; bring us your unique needs and let’s get your brand in front of the right audience.