Introduction
Adora Handmade Chocolates is a Sydney institution. They have a chocolate shop in 7 locations around Sydney but also wanted to increase their online sales.
This family owned business has been proudly making chocolates, sweets and cakes in their Marrickville factory since 1993. Their chocolates are the type that melts in your mouth and put a smile on your face! With so many varieties and flavours it’s hard to pick a favourite – but I do like the blueberry!
Challenges
Their website had been neglected for quite a while by their previous digital agency and had to be cleaned of unwanted plugins (apps), cleared of a lot of old files and updated to the latest version of software.
The website hosting was also very slow and inadequate for the size and scale of the website. The load time for the website was 10.5 seconds.
Navigation was poor and major seasonal chocolate celebrations, such as Easter and Christmas, were hidden in the menu rather than easy for customers to find.
Solutions
After a full website audit, we set to work improving the structure and functionality. Meta descriptions were added to all main pages and keywords were added to all the content. Text was also added behind images to help search engines know what the images were.
Navigation was improved and seasonal celebration pages were given their own menu heading.
High Tea was also given its own menu heading and a special booking form to make it easy for customers to book their time and location.
Process
In addition to improving the structure, we also managed the maintenance of the website to ensure optimal performance.
The website hosting was strengthened to make sure the site could facilitate all customer orders. This improved the load time to 3.6 seconds. This alone will improve the customer experience.
Summary
SEO is an ongoing process and takes time to “kick in”. The Adora website was in such poor condition that small changes have made a big improvement already. Customers can now find what they are looking for easily.
Whilst there have been some technological setbacks, this website is now functioning much better and the goal is to increase online sales over the next 12 months.
Everyone loves a chocolate shop and being able to purchase yummy chocolates from the convenience of your lounge chair means you have Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mothers’ Day and Christmas covered!