We worked with the Buzzz Caribbean Lifestyle Magazine team back in 2020 to completely revamp their blogging website, improve load times and implement SEO best practises.
About the Project
The Problem
As a news publication, your website has to meet two important requirements: accessibility and quick load times!
The team at Buzzz Caribbean Lifestyle Magazine loathed the old look of their website and said it was lacking compared to their competition.
Some key issues identified by the team included:
- Unresponsive and poorly coded navigation menu
- Images were not optimised for faster load times
- The site was using outdated plugins
- Little to no on-page or technical SEO
- Outdated theme that was no longer receiving updates
- Articles were not AMP compatible
The Solution
Improve User Experience
- The magazine's primary audience is older (35+) so we chose to use a serif font and changed the font-size 20px for easier reading.
- Using a full navigation on smaller screens was too much so we added responsive navigation at different breakpoints.
- Prominent social media links on the navigation and footer for fast sharing.
- Added alt tags to every image on the website to make it simpler for screen readers to interpret.
- Optimised the home page to focus on popular categories and added a search bar to find specific content.
- AMP integration to make pages load even faster on mobile devices running on 2G and 3G networks.
- Added Buzzz Caribbean Lifestyle Magazine to Google news so readers can access content from the news aggregator.
Speed Optimisation
- Removed the outdated theme and went with a modern, light-weight template.
- Cached static pages for faster load times.
- Optimised WordPress databases to remove leftovers from previous plugins.
- Removed unused images from the media library to free up space on the server.
- Minimised CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files for faster content delivery.
- Switched from the slow, bulky, clunky, dinosaur known as WPBakery to Gutenberg blocks.
- Compressed large photographs to reduce page size and improve load times.
Search Engine Optimisation
Since Buzzz is a magazine, they needed to attract readers to their website.
We used a combination of on-page, off-page and technical SEO to improve Buzzz Caribbean Lifestyle Magazine's ranking.
- Keyword research to find high-quality, low difficulty keywords with lots of search volume per month
- Built strong internal links on relevant content pages
- Added new articles that covered trending topics
- Optimised meta titles and descriptions
Some of our off-page strategies included:
- Sharing articles to major social media network
- Influencer marketing on Instagram
- Securing backlinks on websites related to the client's niche
The Results
Website Analytics
We managed to increase Buzzz Caribbean Lifestyle Magazine's total clicks on Google by 7,660 and boosted impressions by 249,000 in over 229 countries across the globe.
- 10,000+ visitors
- 10,000+ new visitors
- 12,000+ sessions
- 23,000+ page views
- 2-minute session duration
- 50% bounce rate
We also improved Buzzz’s SEO ranking on the web and got them to the first page of Google for specific keywords. Here’s an example of what we’ve managed.
Speed Improvements
Our speed optimisation also had a noticeable impact on the load times of the website. In our most recent test, we managed to improve the website's load times from 30 seconds to 1.1s when accessed from San Antonio, Texas and 987ms when accessed from Vancouver, Canada.
We managed to improve the website’s load time from over 30 seconds to 1.7 seconds when accessed from Canada and 987 milliseconds when accessed from the United States.
