Empire Philatelists
Intro
In 2024, Wind & Kite suggested that Empire Philatelists completely rebuild and refresh the entire front end using Hyvä themes to simplify the code base to make maintenance and Magento updates easier for the client, whilst improving the store's usability for customers.
Problem
Empire Philatelists previously had poorly written third-party modules making updates time-consuming and troublesome. Wind & Kite used their expertise to replace these modules with new modules or build bespoke modules. The changes allowed a full Magento upgrade to take place as part of the build in very little time, ensuring that future maintenance will be much easier.
Empire Philatelists has an extremely loyal and regular customer base, due to the specialism they sell under and their excellent portfolio, however, their site lacked a consistent user experience and design, making it difficult for their specific customer group. Out-of-the-box Hyvä has a modern and user-friendly interface, giving an instant improvement to the Empire Philatelists website, which Wind & Kite took further to redefine the experience while maintaining the Empire Philatelists brand guidelines.
Wind & Kite worked closely with Empire Philatelists to build new functionality to make the store work for their customers, including a redefined navigation system for improved user journeys across the site.
Empire Philatelists was passionate about ensuring that their website was suitable for their loyal customers and being aware that the majority of their customers were mature users, there was a focus from Wind & Kite on ensuring that the website was accessible, with large and clear fonts along with appropriate colour contrast as well as the use of larger images to showcase the items being sold.
Empire Philatelists was given additional training and support from Wind & Kite to ensure they could manage content in-house without the need for additional support and costs,
Wind & Kite facilitated this training so that Empire Philatelists could build out feature-rich content pages autogenously.
As part of the investigative work conducted before the new Hyvä build for Empire Philatelists, it was discovered that 100% of the mobile and desktop pages tested by Wind & Kite failed Google’s Core Web Vitals Assessments.
In the month since the site went live under the new Hyvä theme, Wind & Kite has retested all the pages and seen outstanding improvements to their Core Web Vitals results, along with these tested pages now passing Google’s Core Web Vitals Assessments.
Solution & Results
Below are some of the impressive improvements that Empire Philatelists has seen since moving to Hyvä:
- Google's performance score on the Home Page improved by 378% on mobile and 114% on desktop
- Google's performance score on Product Listing Pages (Category Page) improved by 183% on mobile and 63% on desktop.
- Google's performance score on a Product Detail Page (Product Page) improved by 200% on mobile and 159% on desktop.
- Google's performance score on a secondary Product Detail Page (Product Page) improved by 760% on mobile and 67% on desktop.
Google Performance Speed Test Scores
Home Page
Category Page
Product Page (1)
Product Page (2)