Website updates increase website traffic by ~60%
Sometimes it’s not just about keeping everything running smoothly, but about innovating. That was the case for Kidney Care UK (KCUK), founded initially as the British Kidney Patient Association (BKPA) by Elizabeth Ward OBE in 1975. They are the UK’s leading kidney patient support charity. Their advice, support and financial grants help thousands of kidney patients and their families annually. As an organisation boasting such a long and storied history, improvement and innovation were definitely on the cards. That’s why when we got the job to transition their website, we exceeded expectations and turned it into a long and profitable client relationship.
What was the state of play?
KCUK was based on Wagtail CMS. This open-source CMS is partly funded by Google and features everything a large organisation needs like enterprise translation and localisation capabilities, configurable workflows, premium content management tools, great search and more. According to their website, “Wagtail is built in Python, one of the most popular global programming languages, used widely in machine learning and big data. And, Wagtail is always improving.” That was good news for us, as we knew how many people relied on Kidney Care UK and their support. We’d had experience transitioning websites with Wagtail before, and so we followed our proven 3-step process.
Setup
We created a bespoke server setup based on their current and future website resource usage.
Backup
We then implemented custom backup rulesets to align with the organisation’s own data policy.
Monitor
Then we enabled specific server monitoring tools that will give advance notice and alerts of any issues.
We did this locally first, testing and tweaking until it was ready to go onto a staging server. We noted in our case study, that from there, it was up to the “QA team to review and compare with the existing site, noting any discrepancies for the development team to resolve. Once our QA team were happy with the Wagtail website’s functions and performance and KCUK had signed off on User Acceptance Testing; [we] then changed the DNS settings to put the transitioned website live.” This is the best process to follow if you want to move from signed-off UAT right into go-live without any downtime (a critical requirement for KCUK).
Post-transition
Following that successful transition and for more than 4 years now, Wirebox has supported KCUK with maintenance and updates; overseeing a traffic growth of 60% through SEO, landing page optimisation, better page speed and increased site security. Part of that is always evaluating to make sure you don’t need to change your website host to get a performance boost.
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We’ve also worked in tandem with their team to manage high-traffic periods and align on digital campaigns – including a collaboration between KCUK, Astrazeneca and Wirebox to promote a quiz around the risk factors of Chronic Kidney Disease. It’s that intense level of partnership that we think makes us even more valuable to our clients. We not only deliver excellent KPIs but our team gets invested – our lead, Ryan, even completed a charity skydive on their behalf in October 2019, raising over £350.
If that sounds like the kind of relationship you want with your tech partner, please reach out today.
