Updraft WP Software is the author of UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin used by website owners, developers and agencies to back up their websites.
Updraft had acquired other plugins over the years, and UpdraftPlus had became both the product and the parent brand, resulting in a confusing brand hierarchy.
I recommended and led the project to create a unified parent brand and to consolidate three product websites into one, to improve cross-sell.
It was a meaty project!
The before
The updraftplus.com site had some issues. It had a flat hierarchy and a challenging user flow. Technically the site was slow and not optimised for mobile, which impacted performance and SEO.
Its front-end page builder was both too flexible and too limiting. Legacy teams had introduced new colours, button styles, and imagery, leading to an inconsistent look and feel.
GA4 wasn’t configured properly and so some web page traffic wasn’t being tracked, whilst other sessions were captured twice.
The during
- My team and I conducted a full site audit, categorising 3,000 pages as either ‘keep’ ‘kill’, ‘combine’ or ‘needs
improvement’. - Created a new sensible site architecture.
- Conducted SEO research to create web page layouts that would rank.
- Re-wrote key conversion pages following keyword research.
- Set up 301 redirects for every page to preserve SEO value, paying particular attention to killed pages to ensure users were redirected to somewhere sensible.
- Created a new brand look and feel that would also pass accessibility tests.
- Implemented a new instance of GA4.
- Implemented UTM tracking parameters across every source, from social media posts to email signatures so that traffic would be attributed to the correct medium in GA4.
The after
Where previous websites failed, teamupdraft.com now passes core web vitals, with significantly improved Google PageSpeed Insights scores, as shown below.
PageSpeed Insight Score
Desktop
Mobile
The website relaunch delivered early success. Straight away we could see that new feature pages alone drove an additional $10,687 in revenue within the first few months.