Significant site speed performance with a Kentico 13 .NET Core rebuild
About the client
Envision is one of the largest employers of people who are blind or visually impaired. Envision’s programs are designed to meet the needs of the whole individual at any age or level of vision loss, encompassing vision rehabilitation, therapy, support programs, activities, and more.
The challenge
EnvisionUS.com was built in 2014 on Kentico 9, a version no longer supported by the Kentico Xperience platform. Their site had grown organically over seven years, becoming bigger and bulkier. This had made their user flows more complex and had slowed down the site.
Envision needed an upgrade for multiple reasons. They wanted to empower their internal teams to do more with their website: add pages, update content, add widgets, etc. They needed a visual refresh to match their updated branding and they wanted to cut unnecessary content to streamline the user experience. On top of that, they wanted to improve their site performance and SEO.
Our approach
We redesigned EnvisionUS.com and rebuilt the site on Kentico Xperience 13 with ASP.NET Core MVC. This upgraded their technology stack in two major ways: from Portal Engine to MVC and from .NET Framework to .NET Core.
MVC allowed us to rebuild this site with less code bloat. We included the out-of-box features they needed and left out the ones they didn’t, keeping the code minimal and efficient.
.NET Core is the way of the future, and older hosting technologies are reaching end of life. This upgrade guaranteed that EnvisionUS.com would receive security support and feature enhancements for years to come.
Final experience
The performance and speed of EnvisionUS.com has exceeded all expectations. The site received exceptional Google PageSpeed Insights scores immediately after launch, scoring as high as 93 for performance, 100 for accessibility, and 92 for SEO.
For Envision, this means that their users are experiencing extremely fast page loads and smooth sessions. And since Google is now prioritizing faster sites, EnvisionUS.com is now set up to rank better in organic search.
Envision’s staff can now easily edit their website, from minor copyedits to adding net new forms and pages. The content and visual elements are a better representation of who they are now—more accurately representing their refreshed brand.
By the numbers
91%
of pages ranked “good” by Google Search Console
27%
YoY increase in organic search traffic to services pages
100
score for accessibility
“We couldn’t be happier with our recent website upgrade to Kentico Xperience 13. Our site is lightning fast, and we are getting incredible feedback on it. The speed and performance benefits of .NET Core have exceeded my expectations. I’d recommend it to anyone considering an upgrade.”
Terri Maus
Senior Director of Marketing