Problem
Synergy Race Timing’s website was launched several years ago and was using the proprietary Divi Theme Builder. Divi had caused the backend of the website to lag and editing pages was extremely difficult and slow.
Synergy Race Timing’s visitors’ demographics had also changed over the years and the website’s indexing of each race result page was being hurt by the website structure. Synergy Race Timing was also in need of improving their SEO ranking for Northern California cities specifically and their race result pages were not optimized for SEO and did not follow current industry standards for structure and hierarchy, therefore they were not able to take advantage of the organic information of each of their race result pages.
Synergy Race Timing wanted a more modern look and looked to improve the mobile user’s experience when viewing their race results.
Solution
Shaw Web Designs worked with Eric, the owner of Synergy Race Timing, to identify what his ultimate needs were and developed a plan to meet them.
First step was to tackle the biggest hurdle, migrating from a Divi theme. The biggest problem with Divi sites is that all content is merged together with Divi’s shortcodes and stored in the database like that. So standard export processes would not work in this instance. Manually replicating the site was out of the question with over 670 race result pages to export. To add to the challenge, each race result page had their race results generated by a table plugin, which had its own shortcode. So stripping all shortcodes was not an option.
Shaw Web Designs developed an automated process that would strip out only the Divi shortcodes from a standard export, leaving just the pure content and table shortcodes. With a clean spreadsheet of all the race result pages, we imported and generated all 670 plus race pages as Custom Post Types with Custom Taxonomies and Custom Fields.
Working with Eric, we designed a new look for his website that represented Synergy Race Timing’s brand and highlighted their professionalism. The new design gives a feeling of movement, energy and precision.
Custom code was written to simplify the addition of new race result pages and to optimize them for the best SEO results possible, automatically. Each race result page can now be indexed and includes date and can highlight Northern California locations, to improve SEO.
All plugs were reviewed and replaced where needed. Several custom functions were written to expand the abilities of several of the plugins.
New Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Disclaimer and Cookie Policies were added to help Synergy Race Timing comply with many privacy laws that have been implemented by certain states and set a foundation for changes in the future. These policies show a commitment to transparency to their customers on how they will or won’t use their data.
Synergy Race Timing’s new WordPress website is now using current commercially acceptable standards and technologies, which will allow it to adapt for many years.
Shaw Web Designs also recommended an in-depth Scoping Audit every 1-2 years to keep in step with ever-changing technology and perform a site refresh as needed.