Mr Clutch Website Speed Improvements

The Mr Clutch brand is nationally recognised as one of the premier autocentre groups in England. They have over forty branches across the country each of which provides a wide range of garage services; these include the fitting of clutches, brakes and manual transmissions. Many of the locations are also able to carry out full car servicing, general repairs and, in selected centres, MOT testing.

why wirebox?

Mr Clutch has been working with Wirebox for over six years on various projects. During that time, Wirebox developed all of Mr Clutch’s digital systems including a careers website, job diary and booking forms. Being a well established name in the auto industry helped Mr Clutch achieve good organic search results. However, with new competitors on the scene using the latest SEO tactics to get higher rankings in Google, Mr Clutch needed to improve their site if they wanted to stay on top.

Speed is one of the most important features of a website. Not only is it important for users, but Google and other search engines take speed into consideration as a ranking factor. Google recently announced that they will be updating their ranking factors in May and a fast site is going to be crucial to stay at the top of the rankings. Google, for example, provides many tools to measure your speed and see how you compare to other sites. The Mr Clutch site was doing ok, but there was definitely room for improvement to stay on top of the rankings.

our approach_

the project included:

• Metric Gathering: Establish the current speed and score of the website using tools such as Google Speed Test, GT Metrics and SEM Rush.
• Planning: How to implement and improve the site’s speed and metrics. The site has many different features and any changes could have an effect on these.
• Implementation: Roadmap against a testing process will ensure the improvements will not cause the website to fail. Many of the fixes can break the existing code or any 3rd party apps.

outcomes_
our approach delivered:

• A better score, better position and a better experience
• Increased speed and scores across all metric testing websites resulting in a near perfect 99% speed score from a previous result of 21% . This is particularly impressive due to the complexity and heavy features of the site: booking systems, payments, scheduling and look ups.
• Page load speed increased from 7.8 seconds to under 2 seconds
• SEO rankings on keywords increased
• The website loaded faster for the user, this helps to keep customers happy with a positive user experience, another important Google ranking factor.
• Increase in bookings, Mr Clutch had an increase in sales and conversions for all their services online of over 5%.