Hand Picked Hotels is an award-winning group of country house hotels and spa resorts. Providing an unforgettable experience for guests, they have 19 stylish destinations throughout the UK and the Channel Islands.
Performance is fast becoming one of the most important issues for websites. Today, technology allows us to do some amazing things online. But devices can’t always keep up.
This was the scenario for Hand Picked Hotels. Although the website ticked many boxes for look and feel, we soon discovered the opportunity for key performance wins.
There’s a lot that can help a large site load faster or, at least, load progressively. It was our job to get this luxury hotel site ready for refurbishment.
We approach technical audits in four stages and look at a site in terms of:
1. Performance
2. Accessibility
3. User experience
4. Crawlability
It is important to cover all areas because great websites work for everyone - humans and bots. However, our team understands that best practices - and particularly algorithms - change. That’s why we only test against up-to-date standards.
Analysing the website’s SEO and UX, we came up with a comprehensive 70+ page audit. Additionally, there was a clear appendix of issues and recommendations including:
- Brief summaries of every issue
- The frequency of instances
- Which discipline is best to manage the issue
- The priority of every issue (low, medium and high)
But for any team of developers, making these changes could feel intimidating. That’s why we stayed on hand to help support Hand Picked Hotels at every stage of the process.
At this time, not all of the changes have been made. But when comparing two twelve-month periods, they’ve already seen:
The bounce rate drop by 6.48%
The conversion rate increase by 35.63%
Our collective team has a wealth of experience across the full spectrum of digital agency services including brand, web, Ecommerce, CRM, strategy and marketing. If you’d like advice about any aspect of your digital touchpoints, drop us a line today.
