Requirements

Whisky International Online came to us in the summer of 2019 with a large number of obstacles with their current WordPress website. We were tasked with pushing the website forward in a number of areas to increase global sales for the business.

In the beginning, we needed to bring the website architecture up to scratch. The WordPress theme hadn’t been updated in almost 2 years. Plugins were outdated for a similar period and a number of functions of the website were not working as they should. The previous hosting environment wasn’t allowing the site to load to its full potential. So we firstly migrated the site to one of our high spec servers. Optimising the site where possible to improve the load time from 7 seconds on the old hosting environment. To what you see now, with an average load time of around 1.1 seconds.  A vast improvement and quick win for our client.

After the hosting setup was addressed, we then carried out a range of WordPress development tasks on their website. Firstly from a security perspective. Starting out by taking a copy of the website in a staging environment on our servers. Then performing necessary upgrades to the theme and plugins to bring them all onto the latest versions. Non essential plugins were disabled to lighten the load. Or custom functions were created to perform the same facility on the site, with a reduced load.

Once the website was running the latest versions of all components and was stable/secure. We could then move on to the more exciting design elements of the site improvements phase. A large number of optimisations were made on the mobile and tablet layout of the site. Some branding elements were addressed to create a more coherent feel. While colour scheme and fonts were also changed. As well as this we created a new header structure for the website. The new layout helped customers find key parts of the site quicker, with less clicks.

We continue to provide this client with website hosting and ongoing support/site maintenance. Our managed hosting packages all include regular plugin, theme and WordPress version updates from stable releases. To ensure the site doesn’t get into a position again of being insecure or unstable with front-end components breaking for customers.

As e-commerce continually evolves, we will work ongoing each month to aid with WooCommerce optimisation for Whisky International Online. As well as looking at further SEO improvements to help the brand perform to it’s best online. Ultimately working with the client to grow sales month on month. With a key goal of delivering a fantastic return on their investment.