Site Rebuild

Challenge

The Gearwrench and Crescent Tool websites were slow, the content was hard to update, made it hard to sync products on the website with their internal systems, and lacked good design and search functionality.

Solution

VMLY&R rebuilt the sites within Drupal using a customized responsive theme and a library of components designed to standardize the user and content editor experience. By doing this, the discoverability team was able to leverage the power of Drupal core and its contributed modules to immediately raise the SEO value of the site.

During this rebuild, we added the ability to quickly and easily import the latest list of products and images into the website. We also implemented a brand new Where To Buy feature to help customers purchase the products they need.

Using component functionality and selective cache purging, content entry is quick, easy, and reliable. This goes hand in hand with our automated product synchronization and the site search functionality which leverages Apache Solr through Acquia Search. Thus creating a seamlessly responsive experience for users.

Results

Immediately after launching the new websites, Gearwrench saw an organic search new user growth of 21%, a bounce rate reduction of 52%, and an average session duration increase of 22%. Site performance improved significantly too with a 61% reduction in average page load time and an average page download time reduction of 92%. With the introduction of a where-to-buy feature, improved design, and incredible site performance improvements, we are connecting users of the website with the quickest path to purchase which has resulted in a 25% increase in sales.

Using Drupal multisite allowed us to build multiple different websites managed within the same codebase and Acquia instance that is able to share common functionality and key features which simplifies maintenance and speeds up the time to launch. We were able to leverage features of the latest versions of Drupal to automate the import of products and the export of warranty submissions to their SAP instance.