Revamping a Commercial Property Site
Recently, Devstars was entrusted with the redevelopment of the London commercial property site for Cushman & Wakefield. The project was divided into several parts, and numerous concerns were identified from the start. Here’s a rundown of the challenges we encountered and how we addressed them.
Whilst this is a WordPress site our background specialising in bespoke solutions for clients and utilising agile development proved invaluable on this project.
Solving WordPress Problems
As with many numerous WordPress sitess that we take over the site had been loaded up with way too many plugins and so our first task was to audit these and see what could be removed or replaced.
Data Feed Automation
The existing data feed for properties no longer worked, and a new data stream the client wanted to connect to didn’t match the unstructured format of the existing properties. The website also had six buggy user forms, multiple calls to action, and a navigation menu with too many items.
Plug-in management
To address these issues, we started by creating a staging site and removing unused elements, fixing the forms and improving page loading times. We reduced the plugins from 26 to 10, removing Contact Form 7 and creating a bespoke form instead, which would capture page history to inform the sales staff of the user’s requirements.
This approach reduced load times, providerd valuable metrics and reduced maintenance and admin time.
Data Feed Challenges
The new data feed presented one of the significant challenges. The properties’ latitude and longitude coordinates did not match the sub-market areas that the client had built into the website.
Devstars created geofenced areas for these sub-markets to enable the properties to match them. This allowed users to navigate through the sub-markets.
Additionally, filters were built into the site for searching by price. Users could then add locations to a shortlist and send these as emails.
UX and Technical SEO Issues
Devstars simplified the navigation and key user journeys, addressing the UX concerns. We addressed technical SEO issues such as duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, and a broken sitemap.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
We set up GA4 and configured events in Google Tag Manager to record and understand friction areas and drop-offs. Finally, they created a dashboard in Google Data Studio to provide the client with at-a-glance insights.
