Classified Website Performance Improvement – A Case Study

Company Background
The UAE based classified website provides FREE posting services to the local requirements regarding properties, automobiles, jobs, consumer items like electronics, jewellery, books, computers, various appliances along with different types of services. This ambitious startup is initiated by young entrepreneurs, who are passionate to lead the classified market in UAE cities, though they are late entered into the online advertising market. Yet they accept the challenges and to establish their remarkable presence among the others in this region. The website’s unique features put up buyers and sellers on a single platform to meet up their needs. Whether you are looking for apartments, villa or land for residential or commercial, their huge database helps you to select your dream property and any other needs instantly to buy or sale.

The Problems:
The website was started initially with preliminary features of classifieds. It was working fine with well indexed in Google. The website was listed with various keywords. Later on many new features had been integrated that made the website more complex over the period along with accumulating the huge database that caused several issues as below –

  1. Frequent changes in classified website to enhance its comprehensive features made the changes in navigation and URL structure were causing problems in Google indexing and listing stability.
  2. The site became too slow in accessing the webpages that was ultimately affecting the site visibility to the users as well hindering in promotion of the website.
  3. The desktop version of the website was not attracting the mobile users. The growing mobile accessibility was the core issue that was hampering the traffic growth for non-mobile friendly websites and was increasing the bounce rate from mobile devices.
  4. Accumulating classified records on single domain had created Manageability, indexing and crawling issues, when the number of classifieds went beyond thousands of records. As to manage them and to cater the accurate organic search results tend requirement to restructure website with different city wise sub-domains.

Thus, there were big challenges when the website had grown and competing to UAE leading classified websites. As in a short span, with the new and unique features had made it the most popular in region with constant growing traffic and search. The client was happy but at the same time worried to above issues those need to tackle tactfully.

The Solution Offered at Opal Infotech

As a classified website developer and optimizer, Opal Infotech had a great responsibility to develop it with the expanded scope and maintain the website visibility in search engines to grow the traffic further. Keeping this in focus, we offered the effective solutions as below –

  1. Revamped the site structure and database without affecting the look and feel of visitor experience and even improved it further keeping the site flexibility of future expansion. The navigation and URL structure made more user-friendly and SEO friendly.
  2. Web page speed is one of the most important factors to attract, retain and satisfy the visitors need on your website. Page speed also tends to be considered as an important search engine parameter to list the site better than others. Thus opal development team took an initiative for the Speed Solution by Query Optimization for MySQL.
  3. To tap the mobile users, Opal created the mobile website for this classified website that can be in sync with the desktop version while updating the posts. This made the website easy accessible for the mobile users with increased time spend on the website. Even this has increased the speed of the website as the access is now evenly distributed among desktop and mobile users that have reduced the load significantly.
  4. For easy navigation, access and indexing in search engine, Opal Team offered a solution to categorized classifieds city wise with different city wise sub-domains. That not only differentiates the city wise classifieds but also made navigation and search easy for the users with optimized server speed.

Results
With the effective development and optimization actions, Opal could achieve several important aspects for the website as below-

  1. On revamping the site, the website features like Recently Viewed Ads, Add to wishlist etc are extended to the users with wider scope.
  2. Property management interface can be developed to promote the prime properties on top of the listing. Live chat feature for property manager integrated.
  3. The URL structure became more SEO friendly that have increased the indexing rate in search engines and ultimately fast crawling improved the listing than before.
  4. The city-wise classified search facility improved with more options and speedy database access.
  5. Now, site looks lighter with easy loading. The website load time significantly reduced as a result we could increase the number of visitors, number of new users, pageviews and average session duration raised.
  6. The mobile visits increased, as now the website is mobile friendly. So mobile users can post their requirements for properties, cars or jobs directly from mobile devices.
  7. The high number of web pages which was initially difficult to index prompt on search engine is now easy with different sub-domains. The increased speed of indexing has increased the site page visibility better in search engine than previous.

This way the classified website performance can be improved at Opal Infotech.