Description
Doorstead is a full-service property management platform. Inspired by their time at Uber and experiences with property managers, the founders Ryan and Jenn built service-guarantee inspired property management to eliminate inefficiencies for homeowners and renters.
Since 2019, Doorstead has been helping thousands of homeowners increase their profits by guaranteeing accurate rent and reducing vacancies, and helping renters find high-quality homes they love.
Challenges
Our goal was to achieve the best possible performance optimization of the existing Doorstead site (according to Pagespeed Insights metrics). The hypothesis were that better site performance would help increase the conversion rate on the website.
Another challenge was the speed of producing new pages and designing the system so that Doorstead could quickly assemble new, personalized, and customized pages for each marketing campaign.
Process
Page speed optimization
First, we studied existing website structure and implementation, identified all parts of the website, and created a list of what can be potentially changed/removed to improve performance. Some things were obvious, like reducing image sizes, changing to WebP format, and making some scripts asynchronous.
Even though the list of common improvements helped, it didn’t achieve the client’s sub 2.0 second First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric.
Doorstead design team created a separate marketing version of the website, with minimal structure, to test the limits of production site performance optimization.
Developing this version, as well as doing in-depth tracing, performance, and networking analysis, we were able to achieve green metrics and sub 2.0 FCP metric.
These metrics are not the best that we could potentially get. Removing some analytics scripts would bring the Pagespeed rating to 95+. But in real-world cases, websites must have analytics and ads options to be able to understand the usage and run effective ad campaigns. That’s why the metrics of real sites are often slightly lower.
Personalization
One of the tasks was to implement a personalization of the site. So that potential clients could see personalized pages and offers (provided they left the request and their info) on subsequent page visits.
Customers and the Doorstead team loved this feature. Check out this page or this one.
Accessibility optimization
Sommo team also made other improvements, such as making sure the Doorstead website implements the best accessibility recommendations, making the site comfortable to use for anyone.
It involved marking images, buttons, and other elements with proper descriptions, adding keyboard-based controls, adjusting color contrasts in a few places.
Receiving top score for the site accessibility audit is a must-have for any company nowadays.
Developing marketing pages
To be able to quickly develop, launch and test new marketing pages. We developed a system of reusable components so that new pages could be developed quickly, there was no need for code or design duplication, and reduced the total number of HTML/CSS code.
Migration to Smarty API
Sommo team helped Doorstead integrate with the new Smarty API (for address auto-complete box). It helped provide more specific address suggestions (compared with Google Geolocation API).
Results
The performance optimizations allowed the Doorstead team to increase conversion rate (CR) performance for some campaigns up to 20%. Which is a huge cost-saving advantage.
The accessibility and personalization improvements helped also improve the CR (but not measured yet in exact numbers).
Launching new campaigns and tests helped the dynamic Doorstead team stay ahead of the competition and move forward with their goal of becoming the leading property management company in the country.
