NineTwoThree led Experian's EDQ website overhaul, enhancing design, SEO, and performance. This resulted in a faster, user-friendly, and competitive site without expanding Experian's team.
Concept
All enterprise marketing teams dread the all-important website refresh. From updating designs to improving page load times, redoing websites with more than 1,000 pages is no small task. Experian realized it needed to update its website for its B2B offering, Experian Data Quality (EDQ). The only problem? It needed a team to execute. NineTwoThree was selected as a design and technology partner to modernize the EDQ website. With our experience in conversion rate optimization, design, and on-page SEO, we were selected to modernize EDQ so it’s in line with modern trends and in line with its competitors. During this project, user experience best practices met EDQ’s refreshed brand to improve design, navigation, technical SEO, and ultimately, conversions.
Challenges
Once we started work with the Experience team, we identified several key challenges at the onset. Experian wanted to overhaul their website on Optimizely’s CMS, which will allow for more A/B testing and personalization campaigns. As is the case with most CMSs’, there was a lot of bloat with unused CSS and JavaScript that was slowing the website load time down. Our team needed to experiment a lot with Optimizely’s CMS to find the best ways to improve load time.
While we had the list of features that Experian wanted for the EDQ website, we didn’t have a lot of direction in design. Our job was to find the right balance of bringing EDQ’s brand forward while improving website performance.
To tackle these challenges, we came up with a strategic plan to refresh their brand while staying within brand guidelines, improve user experience, and increase page loading speeds for SEO. We ultimately enhanced the EDQ site to match their updated brand.
Solution
As a team, we conducted extensive research and analyzed top websites in the technology industry for inspiration. We then crafted a roadmap prioritizing desired features and revamped the user experience with a cleaner, more modern design. For every page we redesigned, we gave the Experian team options of the best ways to modernize the design while following optimization best practices. We focused on enhancing navigation and design, ensuring brand consistency, updating icons, and unifying font styles. The navigation bar was optimized to decrease the DOM size to make the website less memory-intensive, and we implemented accessibility best practices to improve the website experience for everyone. We also implemented new image formats, optimized image sizes, and added lazy loading to ensure the right resources load at the right time. To overcome slow website loading, we split our CSS and JavaScript files into two: one file for loading resources in the viewport, and the second to load the rest of the page. We also stopped third-party tools from loading before they were needed.
Impact
Once we thoroughly tested the new website, we set it live with an immediate impact. EDQ’s website performed better in the following ways:
Faster Site = More Engagement:
With the implementation of the new changes, the website's load speed increased by 30% and the session time increased by 17%. Users found it easier to use and were less likely to leave.
New Organic Traffic:
By improving the website's speed, usability and performance we supported a 50% boost in organic traffic.
Business Outcomes:
This overhaul successfully aligned Experian’s website with its vision and boosted performance for more traffic, conversions, and positive sentiment amongst users.
Our comprehensive approach successfully helped Experian improve its technical SEO, increase user engagement, and modernize its user experience. Experian also didn’t have to take on any headcount. Instead, they had a dedicated engineering project for an intensive project that they scaled down after its completion.
