One of my past clients invested $60K into a WordPress website and waited for eight months for it to be delivered. After the website was delivered

• Many of the functionalities were not working properly (page pagination, some page formatting, 404-error redirects,…)
• The website was heavy and was loading unacceptably slow (since it had 50K+ images from old website all dumped into the website root folder without being organized)
• The integral website plugins were non-replaceable (website was build around them) had a big performance hit
• The hosting server configuration was way below for this type of website and desired performance
• SEO was non-existent on the site so there was no organic traffic expected
• Cornerstone articles for the main keywords were missing so the site could not organically rank high for the most important terms
• Traffic tracking and website analytics were not present so there was no data on visitor’s website activity
• There was no documentation about unified way to post content and approach optimization for the content team to follow
• There was no content posting calendar nor strategy in place so content was posted in a ad-hoc way
• There were no landing pages (for traffic segmentation) in place so all traffic was coming to the home page of the site which was overloaded with choices
• No one from the client team was testing the website and reporting back issues to be addressed
• The embedded videos in the website had no SEO so YouTube was underutilized and video work was practically wasted in terms of organic traffic from YouTube
• There were no rules of engagement in place (replying to post comments) when it comes to social media sites so 1M+ followers on Facebook were showing no engagement on the website

The website was not ready to launch by the initially anticipated date and we had a lot of work to do to just fix the major issues with the website so we can depart from the old and start using the new website as soon as possible. It took several weeks of work to get the major issues worked out and launch the new website with a delay.

Imagine you had a tight deadline and you had to work out the above list before you can launch. That would not work out that well, would it? Bottom line is that you cannot afford this kind of situation and you have to take the guess-work out of your project. In order to do that you have to know what you are doing.

After fixing the major issues with the website, we went from 1M visits per year to 2M, from 45 second average time on website to 4.5 minutes and from 80% bounce rate to 10% bounce rate, just to give you a high level overview.

These numbers are indicators that the traffic that was coming to the website was more interested in the content (more relevant visitors) which in turn convert better than less engaged visitors.

More info and screen-shoots coming soon…