The Problem
When Frederick Duckloe & Brothers Furniture first approached us, they had some serious issues with the usefulness of their current website. We inherited them from at least one other marketing company who had set them up with a website on the Wix platform which that had outgrown and needed to transfer out of.
Wix offers both free and premium hosting plans that are paired with a very powerful visual website builder, so they can seem like a very attractive solution for businesses and individuals alike. But, one of the large downsides of Wix, is that if you want to do anything outside what their developers have built you run out of options very very quickly.
It looks like this is where Duckloe had run aground on the Wix machine. When we were given access they had the following problems:
- Their website used assets that were too large to be mobile friendly, and had several mobile styling issues.
- Their website was generally slow to load and unpredictable to use.
- They had a completely non-functional online store. You could add items to your cart, but there was no way to pay or order them.
- Most likely as a combination of the above factors, they had a high bounce rate which meant that users weren’t even spending the time to look through the interesting history and other confidence factors Duckloe had obviously put a lot of work into generating.
They wanted solutions to these problems as well as a social media push to get their historic business back into the minds of their customers.
A functional eCommerce website functions both as an online catalogue for your products and as an avenue for customers to easily purchase those items.
Our Solution
The first solution was to get them out of Wix. Like most platforms that favor ease of creation over functionality, Wix has a lot of inefficiencies that were working against Duckloe. Additionally the eCommerce functionality of Wix is only available with a premium hosting account, so with that eCommerce not working at all they had no good way to make any of that money back. Rather than send good money after bad we decided to move them to our servers and rebuild their site in the WordPress framework.
After discussing it with Duckloe, we decided to transfer their website design and structure as closely as possible so as to save some of the project budget and to ensure the migration had a minimal impact on their SEO.
This transfer is where we ran into our first and largest issue: Wix is an entirely closed source system. This means that there is no external documentation of their data structures and no promise between their developers and users that those data structures won’t change arbitrarily or suddenly. Whenever we are looking at transferring a large website between frameworks, it’s always more efficient to lean on automated processes, and we did so with Duckloe. However, between the authorship of the process and our use of it, the data structures in Wix had changed somewhat meaning that when the transfer was done we ended up with a great deal of data that was missing, encoded incorrectly, or, as we discovered a little later on, was never right even in the Wix website.
In the end we saved more time than if we had never done the automated process, but we did end up overrunning our estimated project timeline while we rebuilt and corrected the bad data. This was compounded by the fact that data for shipping and pricing had not been entered correctly into the Wix database, something that was not easy to determine from our initial reviews of the website.
The real take away from these issues is that Wix is a bad choice for businesses. While they are easy to use and free, if you ever outgrow their services it is expensive and complicated to transfer yourself from their services. In most cases you will end up spending the money you thought you were saving. WordPress is free, has drag and drop page editors, and WordPress-centric hosts are competitively priced with Wix premium. If any marketing company recommends you get a Wix website they aren’t willing to give you their best work, or are somehow affiliated with them.
A functional responsive design ensures that your website will appear at its best no matter what device it is viewed from. While it was common even just a few years ago to have separate websites for mobile devices, having a single responsive website allows you to focus on good content and services instead of worrying about if your websites are delivering the same content.
Getting back to Duckloe, in addition to the transfer of their existing data we also reworked their existing design to incorporate responsive design techniques and fully optimized all of their assets. Between the change in framework, hosting, the responsive design, and the optimized assets we greatly improved the mobile experience of their website.
For the eCommerce portion of their website we utilized WooCommerce, which is a free eCommerce platform built into the WordPress ecosystem. We worked with Duckloe’s existing freight shipping provider and did some additional development to customize a shipping solution for them that took a number of factors into account that most eCommerce websites don’t have to pay as much attention to such as the maximum weight traditional shipping providers like the USPS or FedEx will carry, Freight Route & Driver availability, and other things that come up when you are shipping bulky and heavy items like furniture. For payment we configured their online store to utilize the PayPal account they already had.
Once the website was finished, approved, and launched we got our social media professionals to work attempting to drive traffic to their store and to their website.
The Results
The results are positive but a little mixed. Duckloe has been very satisfied with our services and we have a strong relationship with them. When we sent them our year-end report they had a peak of 535 unique visitors in a single day which was a marked improvement from their previous statistics.
In the same report we were running two Facebook ads for them that had a reach of over 10,000 users, capturing 167 click throughs to the website (accounting for about 1/5 of their single day peak), which means that 4/5 of those users were a combination of organic traffic, word of mouth from those Facebook click throughs, and those Facebook users opening the page a second time directly from another device. These are very healthy single-day results for a website recovering from a high bounce rate.
The activity on the website is where things get a little more rocky. While we were capturing a fair bit of lead information through their contact form and newsletter signup we weren’t seeing any activity on the online store. We’ve reviewed the data and it looks like there are two contributing factors to this user behavior:
- The original online store was non-functional so when the website came back online with essentially the same design there was not explicit communication on the website that the issues had been addressed and the online store was now usable.
- Since Duckloe does craft and ship furniture their online store does have some quirks to necessitate the realities of their business. Their current design does not take these into account and the eCommerce process can be confusing for users who are not familiar with WooCommerce or Duckloe.
The easy solution to both is a recommended redesign of the website and the user experience. While we would love to move on that sooner rather than later, we also understand that the realities of running a business in 2021 mean that some concessions for budget need to be made. It’s also worth noting that while they are not channeling many sales through the online store, the website is still capturing sales for them so while these results are not the best they could be, they are by no means bad.
The ultimate goal of a business website is to help generate sales for that business. While there are a lot of ways to achieve that goal, a website is a success as long as it helps bring in sales.
Overall the project was a clear success. By focusing on speed and optimization we were able to significantly reduce their existing bounce rate, allowing social media pushes to do their work. And while we know what our next steps to increase those numbers are, there are always ways to improve marketing, and like with all business decisions it’s a matter of balancing the budget that dictates the pace of those improvements the most.
Is your website not delivering the results you think it should? Are there features that you would like to implement but find yourself unable to because of skill or hosting environment? You might want to Level Up Your Marketing.
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