Everybody wants to look their best if they’re hitting the beaches on their summer holiday. South Beach Swimwear is a company that designs, manufactures and sells cool beach fashion in the shape of bikinis, swimsuits and loungewear, but also sells more general summery and sporty fashion and accessories.
South Beach had had its Magento Community website designed and built by another agency, but it was not performing at all well for such a recognised brand.
A huge problem that was steering customers away and affecting its search engine rank was its page load times; it was not unusual for a page to take 5 seconds to download, which might have been acceptable in the early noughties but in the mobile era is unacceptably slow. Potential customers are looking for instant results as they compare and contrast numerous products, and no matter how good the fashion is, they won’t wait around if they can’t view or interact with the page.
As with all site recovery jobs, we started with a complete audit of the existing site. It threw up dozens of issues that cumulatively contributed to its slow loading.
The visual design itself was a major factor, so we gave the site a complete re-skin, which also created a more appealing and, crucially, mobile-friendly experience.
Because fashion is all about the subtle details, we also implemented a zoom function, where users could hover over the product images to see a magnified section and get a better impression of the fabric, print and other details.
With our remedial work and re-skinning, we turned the site into a slick, fast experience on any device. The South Beach has experienced a significant upturn in site visits, Google ranking and visit duration for the company.
