Corporate Website on Umbraco Optimized for 6X Faster Loading Speed

Client Profile

The Client, The Instant Group, is a global real estate agency that has been revolutionizing the workspace leasing space since 1999. Besides owning a Sitecore-based digital platform for the online search and rental of office spaces, the Client also has another solution – a corporate news portal on Umbraco, an open-source ASP.NET Core CMS.

Challenge

The Client wasn’t satisfied with how their Umbraco-based news portal was performing. Page load time equaled 5.5 seconds and the website, albeit responsive, had bugs when viewed on mobile devices. In addition, users of different browsers kept bouncing due to cross-browser compatibility issues and there was no multi-language support.

SOLUTION

As SaM Solutions’ team had already demonstrated high competence in another project with The Instant Group – the modernization and maintenance of The Instant Group Real-Estate Marketplace, the Client decided to entrust its Umbraco-based corporate news portal to us. The team consisted of two back-end developers, two front-end developers, and a QA engineer, all working on the project under Agile with releases every four to six months.

Refactoring and Migration to React

The team kicked off the project with an analysis of the website’s code and architecture. Having uncovered a heavy coding approach on slow-performing, outdated technologies, the team decided to perform full solution refactoring. After re-engineering and optimizing the Umbraco back-end, our team also moved the UI from legacy jQuery to a modern React-based solution and was able to preserve the core business logic. Our experts decided to leverage server-side rendering with React, WebPack, and TypeScript.

UI optimization

Per the Client’s request, SaM Solutions also added a UI/UX designer to the project team and completed the website’s full redesign. Over the course of the redesign, our specialists performed a content structure audit, which revealed that the rendering of large-size image files overloaded the website and significantly slowed it down. SaM Solutions’ team not only performed auto-conversion of all the existing images to WebP format, minimizing their size, but also created and installed a custom plugin for image upload.

Migration to Umbraco 8 and Back-End Optimization

Initially, the Client’s website had US and UK English versions with two near-identical content trees. The Client voiced the intention to introduce more language versions, but with Umbraco 7 at the core of its website, the support for multiple languages was limited. To solve this issue, SaM Solutions migrated the website to Umbraco 8 – the Umbraco version that does support different language versions. During the migration process, our team migrated content and optimized the content tree structure to avoid copies, updated necessary code logic, as well as set up all critical redirects.

Continuous Development

As part of the constant growth of their website, the Client regularly requested the development and deployment of new functionalities. Over the years of cooperation, our experts completed:

• Development of new page templates and page components.
• Deployment of a new search mechanism on the website.
• Integration with the Client’s Salesforce system.
• Development of a marketing analytics module for all types of forms.

Technologies

SUCCESS

With their comprehensive approach to optimization and solution growth, the SaM Solutions team has so far:

• Reduced page load time from 5.5 seconds to just 0.9 seconds.
• Fixed all browser compatibility and mobile view issues as well as revamped the design to increase visitor session time.
• Helped to introduce four new website language versions.

The Client continues to rely on SaM Solutions’ assistance in further evolving its website.