Rebuilt and Optimized a Large Consumer Service Provider Platform with 2.5 Million Monthly Traffic

About Client

With over a century of trust, this client offers essential services like roadside assistance, travel planning, insurance, and financial services to millions of members in the northeastern United States. They have established themselves as a key provider of automotive and travel-related services.

With an estimated revenue exceeding $5B and a team of around 2,000 employees, they remain a key resource for their community, ensuring reliable and comprehensive support.

Goal

• Complete the website migration to VIP and transition from the Classic editor to Gutenberg within the urgent 24-day deadline due to the imminent expiration of the existing hosting.
• Ensure the Gutenberg editor is user-friendly and incorporates Dynamic Gutenberg blocks to streamline updates for articles, magazines, and guides, overcoming the customization limitations of the Classic editor.
• Update plugins to ensure compatibility with VIP standards, addressing issues with existing plugins that were not compliant.
• Implement centralized management for sponsors, text ads, and advertisements to streamline ad operations.
• Execute Phase 2 migration by converting all posts and pages into Gutenberg blocks, integrating third-party plugins, transitioning from the old advertisement management plugin to the Advanced Ads plugin, and implementing a republish post functionality for scheduling updates.
• Enhance search functionality with Enterprise Search by WordPress VIP and configure cron scheduling for dynamic tag creation using the Taxopress plugin.

Solution

• Successfully migrated the website from old hosting to WordPress VIP hosting, ensuring a seamless transition without affecting SEO or website performance.
• Transitioned from the Classic editor to Gutenberg to enhance content management ease.
• Developed reusable Gutenberg blocks to address limitations of ACF’s custom fields. These blocks are versatile, easy to use, and applicable across various pages.
• Migrated over 4,000 posts and media from the Classic editor to Gutenberg using an automated migration script, preserving SEO integrity and website performance.
• Implemented block settings to efficiently manage Gravity Form sections.
• Migrated advertisements from Broadstreet to the Advanced Ads plugin, streamlining ad management.
• Implemented VIP Enterprise Search to enhance search functionality, replacing a third-party plugin with a more efficient VIP search algorithm.
• Created reusable Gutenberg Dynamic blocks that allow for flexible article display. Features include element visibility, color settings, and article selectors, with default settings to show the latest articles. These blocks are configurable for different pages, ensuring high reusability.
• Developed a custom republish post feature, allowing posts to be scheduled for republishing at specific times after updates.
• Integrated auto-tagging functionality to dynamically assign tags to posts based on recent updates.

Results

• The transition to the Gutenberg block editor significantly improved the ease of content management, streamlining the editing process.
• The website was successfully migrated to WordPress VIP hosting, ensuring robust performance and scalability.
• Simplified management of advertisements, text ads, and sponsor content, enhancing operational efficiency.
• Achieved better search accuracy and speed with the implementation of WP VIP Enterprise Search, delivering more relevant and timely search results.

During the rollout of the new sites, standard front-end web performance benchmarks improved by 20% to 60%, with an average improvement of 25% across all eight properties.