London Designs
THE LASER BOUTIQUE
Services: Web development, front and back end speed optimisation, new checkout page design and development, post purchase up-sells, abandoned cart email sequences.
The Laser Boutique story
Phil came to us a couple of years ago, very frustrated and fed up with the way web agencies and developers have been dealing with his website.
He had to invest a lot of money in their website along the years and because he never could find an agency or developer that stuck around his website internally was a complete mess, I am sure a lot of you have been in the position where you hired a developer to manager your website only to stop hearing from him after a couple of months.
The Laser Boutique had a myriad of problems, however the underlying and most important ones where: they where paying for expensive VPS servers, their website was performing poor on the front end and back end and they had a high checkout abandonment rate.
Expensive VPS Server
When Phil came over to us, 3 of his problems where interlinked. His first problem was he was paying for a very powerful server that was performing very poor despite paying £120/month!
Slow front and back end
His front end and back end, loaded very slow, which means it used to take 20+ for him to search for a client order and fullfil it.
Secondly, his front end was causing him to lose clients of how slow it was loading.
Hight checkout abandonment
A large number of clients where not coverting from the checkout, they simply stopped when they reached the checkout.
Deprecated coding and PHP
Because the website was never managed properly by anyone, a lot of plugins and systems like PHP where out to date and incompatible with either WordPress, Woocommerce etc
This caused a lot of code to be deprecated and invalid, which was causing a lot strain on the server because it was using system resources that should have been left available for the webbsite and client traffic.
Our solution
Expensive VPS Server / Slow front & back end / Deprecated code
After running various tests we have identified that several issues are potential linked together causing most of the problems the client is experiencing.
Before the website was moved over to the current hosting company, the PHP version powering the websitewas a really old 4.2.
Most hosting companies do not allow such old versions of PHP so most probably when the website was moved over, they also changed over the website to PHP 7.0 thus causing a lot of coding conflicts.
Some of these conflicts where causing the memory and mysql server to be used 170% thus any action on the website was extremly slow.
Our solution was simple, update all the plugins on the website on a staging platform, update the wocoommerce templates used and strip out the old code, fix any instances where old code was no longer compatible with the newer PHP 7.0 and update it to the latest coding standards.
Results where pretty instant and MYSQL load went down to 80%. We tried optimising as much as we could the current server including setting up memcache for query caching to increase server load capacity as anytime the website had over 70 visitors it would crash, but due to limitation imposed by the hosting company we decided to move over his website to our own bespoke NGINX server stacks designed for ecommerce websites.
Results.
- We reduce load levels on the server and increase front end and back end speed by 80%
- We increase server capacity to around 600%
- We decreased hosting bill by around 30% and also included extra services with the hosting such as maintenance.
High Checkout Abandonment Rate
Phil’s last issues was the high number of clients leaving his checkout page without making a purchase.
After reviewing the checkout flow, we identified that clients where asked to provide information that wasn’t required for most B2C transactions such as the “Company name” field, multiple checkboxes for accepting terms and conditions, accepting privacy policy and lastly the way the payment by card was styled wasn’t really intuitive.
We split this problem into two smaller problems.
- Convolutated checkout – which we instantly simplified and made easier and faster to clients to go through.
- Bad card processor gateway – changed imediatly to Stripe, which helped us reduce client friction and one of the bonuses was that Stripe also had lower card processing fees.
Results: 15-20% increase in card payments, and around 10% reduction in card processing fees.
Other Services provided
Complete checkout revamp
Designed and developed a highly optmised checkout page that contains all the elements needed to increase checkout conversion.
Results: 10-15% increase in covnersion or better said 10-15% decrease in abandoned checkout carts.
Exit intent popup
We implemented a popup that is triggered when someone want’s to leave the website page.
This is called an exit intent popup. This strategy increased the list of subscribers by around 20%.
This information was used later on to retarget clients and offer them special offers.
Improved cart page
We simplified the cart page, removed distractions, made it clear and simple to navigate and leave only one way to proceed -> to checkout.
Abandoned checkout
We have extended the functionality of the website so that whenever a client reaches the checkout, enters his email, but does not proceed to checkout, his information is saved in a dashboard, where there is an email sequence that sends special incentives to those people to resume their transaction and complete it.
Results: 10% increase in sales
Extended website functionality
We have extended the website functionality by adding a page where clients can upload their product photos to showcase to other potential clients.
The administrator of the website has full control over what photos are added and which ones aren’t to avoid spam and pornographic content.
What’s next
Revamp of existing website
Our next project with the Laser Boutique is re desiging and building them a new website in line with their branding guides and results they want to achieve.
We are midway through the development of the project and estimate the delivery date of Q3 2020