When Freshy began working with HRchitect, there were many discussions on how to best service their website. There was a need for immediate design updates as well as longer term structural changes. Both teams wanted to take a deeper dive into what could be done to improve the site for the short term and long term. After migrating the site to the Freshy platform, Freshy did a comprehensive audit of the site on the frontend and backend. This included an overview of the health of the existing site, plugin, page, and post type review, competitor analysis, user interface and user experience assessment and more. Freshy made proactive recommendations on all categories listed above and provided a sample site map and an optimized home page structure.
The next step was to determine how best to move forward with HRchitect’s vision for design and backend functionality. Freshy provided several options on how to best achieve the top-line goals and ultimately both teams felt a full redesign was warranted. The options explored were: a full redesign, incremental updates over time, and a re-theme.
We found Freshy after going through some less-than-stellar experiences with other WordPress agencies. Working with Freshy has been a dream! Their team is highly responsive, thorough, and consultative in guiding us through a website technical optimization. Freshy has made a tremendous positive impact on our organization’s website in a very short period of time. We have found a long-term WordPress partner in Freshy.
Freshy first migrated the HRchitect site to an optimized hosting platform and then reviewed the basics of site health. This included benchmark speed testing, status of all pages and posts and post types and a review of all broken links found throughout the site.
This allowed both teams to develop an understanding of what could be done within the existing website platform, and what would prove more difficult without updating the site as a whole. We were able to weigh the pros and cons of each of the three resulting design options: Full rebuild, incremental updates, Re-theme.
The next step was to review all plugins, pages, posts and post types on the site. The purpose of this was to eliminate any excess weight on the site, especially items that were either no longer in use or had outdated content. We were able to cut the amount of plugins used in half, remove a dozen content pages that were no longer needed and cut ~1,200 various posts from the site.
After these changes were made we saw an increase in speed and performance by a full letter grade according to GT Metrix.
After removing all excess content from the site, Freshy provided recommendations on an updated sitemap, main menu, and footer menu. This revealed further opportunities to optimize and reorganize the site, as well as better cater to core audiences.
Freshy created a prospective home page wireframe to show the optimal page structure from top to bottom. This included rearranging existing content as well bringing in new sections that we felt were missing from the original site.
After a briefing session, Freshy did a deep dive into HRchitect’s competitor websites and explored how the current site served its user base. We also provided sample sites that we felt were accomplishing similar goals as described by the HRchitect team. We also identified what brand design elements were working well and what could be improved on in phase II of the redesign project.
Another major part of the design review was to take a look at mobile responsiveness and how the website experience could be improved. Freshy found that the site was not well optimized for mobile and identified specific changes to be made throughout.
When we started the project there were many different directions discussed and we ultimately decided that a full site audit would help us choose the right path. The HRchitect team has already been super engaged throughout the Phase 1 process and have given us a lot of thoughtful, well put together feedback on our audit findings. I’m excited to see what strategies and designs we can develop together for the Phase 2 rebuild!
Kelsey Moore | Director of Customer Experience | Freshy
