Fixing Performance Issues for Financial Services Marketing Umbraco Site

When poor performance and a lack of scalability impacted the delivery of a marketing led digital campaign for a major financial services client their agency turned to Carbon Six Digital for help.

Client’s challenge

Our client, a marketing and design agency in the South East, had a long and established relationship with their client, a global player in the financial services sector. Having successfully delivered marketing campaign websites previously they had been engaged to develop enhancements to an Umbraco powered campaign microsite.

While simple in terms of functionality, the new project required an expansion in the volume of content and the number of languages supported by the site. The agency engaged with Carbon Six Digital when it was found that the site no longer performed effectively, with page load timed in minutes as opposed to seconds, with frequent crashing.

Carbon Six Digital’s solution

After an initial website health check of the project Carbon Six quickly produced a project backlog using collaborative project management software to identify the key outstanding features that required development. By using an agile approach to the development, the team were able to begin work on the project quickly without the need for significant analysis and design work.

We deployed a team of highly experienced Umbraco developers and divided the team into those focussed on feature enhancement, and those focussed on stabilising the existing code base.

The feature enhancement team focussed on redesigning the front end, implementation of Umbraco Courier and implementing new features for localisation of content alongside system, integration and UAT testing.

The performance enhancement team undertook detailed analysis of the code in the system and found that a combination of legacy code that had been poorly optimised; as well as a complex structure caused the site to scale badly when any more than a handful of pages were loaded into Umbraco. The existing code base was progressively enhanced, with each interim step being performance profiled, until an acceptable level of performance was achieved.

In order to recover lost time on the project Carbon Six's content management team were also engaged to upload hundreds of pages of campaign assets into the system, and make content modifications in a number of different local language variants of the site.

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Impact on the customer

Carbon Six Digital’s intervention stabilised the project preventing further delays to the project, and ensured that the final system met the end-client’s quality criteria and passed all security penetration testing.

The code developed as part of this project has since gone on to be used on a number of future projects where the client agency were engaged by the financial services client, which has reduced the cost of development, increased consistency and consequently improved supportability of the sites.

Tell us about your Umbraco project

Carbon Six Digital deliver digital solutions on behalf of some of the world’s most successful companies and some of the UK’s leading agencies obtaining clients from various sectors. Call us on 01276 817465 to find out how we can deliver on your Umbraco web development project.

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