Users would go to that site and you could noticeably see the delay as everything took time to load, and because of all the work to simplify everything, the site just felt as though it loaded instantly.
James Bavington is CTO of UK-based StrategiQ, an award-winning strategy-first digital agency which helps ambitious brands outperform across all marketing channels including brand, video, web, design, UX, SEO, social, content, and more. They are the top WordPress agency in the UK and a WP Engine partner.
In this episode of Velocitize Talks, James Bavington shares his insights on open source, WooCommerce, and site consolidation.
WordPress & Open Source
It is that accessible open-source CMS that makes it the world’s best CMS today.
StrategiQ is the largest WordPress agency in the UK, working with both small and large businesses to meet the needs of in-house marketing teams and content management. WordPress dominates the CMS landscape as the most widely used platform to date, powering over 40% of the web. Open source allows businesses to accelerate their website development and design and make timely adjustments.
“WordPress gives businesses a platform to do really simple things that historically could be unavailable to them and to their teams,” Bavington says.
An increasing number of enterprises and large corporations are turning to WordPress for their website and content needs. WordPress has also grown exponentially in terms of market share and built-in scalability, and boasts a large collaborative community.
“We’re seeing a whole spectrum of clients from small businesses that we work with right the way up to large enterprise business because it is a content-first accessible platform,” Bavington says. “It’s not all about having to be able to write code to make a page work a certain way.”
Although proprietary solutions were more traditionally used by the enterprise, an open-source solution lends itself more to longevity since it can easily adapt to website changes and revisions over the years.
“If you utilize WordPress in the right way, content editors can really produce anything from changing small things on the website to creating new pages, creating great looking content, but even setting out and launching campaigns without fear of breaking anything,” Bavington says.
E-Commerce & WooCommerce
WooCommerce for me is a great platform. It’s a bit of a Goldilocks solution for certain clients if they’re looking for the flexibility and simplicity that it can bring.
Bavington says that WordPress and WooCommerce continue to be a great fit for StrategiQ’s e-commerce clients in the face of an economic downturn. WooCommerce is one of the most popular hubs for e-commerce due to its proficiency in managing sales and in marketing to a growing number of customers.
Traffic is obviously a major consideration for any e-commerce solution. However, StrategiQ is careful to place a greater emphasis on existing site traffic rather than focusing on driving more traffic.
To increase conversions, e-commerce businesses need to prioritize a seamless customer experience that can facilitate an effective promotional cycle as well as a distraction-free checkout process with clear shipping options.
Reuters & SEO
Over the years, certain aspects of the global agency services had their products and services fragmented into a lot of different microsites.
StrategiQ worked with Reuters to consolidate its global content to a new platform, creating a central source of information to maintain traffic. The award-winning campaign saw an increase in traffic, boosted by a solid SEO strategy, by over 260%. StrategiQ was able to consolidate all of these microsites into one, vastly improving the customer experience.
However, SEO wasn’t the primary driver for the Reuters project; instead, it was to enhance the user experience through the consolidation of their products. This involved merging the global editions of the website into one consistent source of information without impacting their search engine rankings and organic traffic.
StrategiQ was awarded Best Large SEO Campaign at the UK Search Awards in 2021 for their work with Reuters.
The Broke Backpacker & Web Vitals
It was a little bit of a Frankenstein that needed simplification.
StrategiQ partnered with WP Engine to refresh the website for The Broke Backpacker and create a better front-end experience to improve Google Core Web Vitals. Their work resulted in a much faster and functional website, and consequently higher web vitals scores.
“They came to us with a very bulky website that had been worked on by dozens of developers over the years,” Bavington says.
The agency conducted a complete rebuild of The Broke Backpacker’s WordPress website, including significantly reducing the number of plugins, which provided much-needed functionality coupled with a clean code base.
This is James’s second time appearing on Velocitize Talks. His first interview was in 2020.
Learn more about StrategiQ on their website and follow them on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and on X/Twitter at @strategiq. To keep up with James Bavington, follow him on LinkedIn.