Website Optimization: Hughes Precision

Hughes Precision is a firearms parts manufacturer located in Onaway, Michigan. They were referred to me by another client to help address serious issues that were threatening to essentially destroy their business. The issues were multiple:

• excessive downtime
• fraudulent orders causing payment processor to halt credit card processing
• less than optimal site content

The solutions to these issues and more were multi-faceted.

Site Downtime

One of the first issues needing to be addressed was to keep the site up. It was pretty apparent that Hughes Precision’s previous hosting provider wasn’t able to provide services that could handle the site load. Honestly, the Hughes Precision site was not particularly “high traffic” and most competent web hosting providers should have been able to easily handle the load; I’m guessing this was a situation where the previous hosting provider “over-provisioned” their servers, a common occurrence with many low-cost web hosting providers. Downtime stretching into double-digit hours is simply not acceptable for an e-commerce website.

The website was migrated to a quality web hosting provider: KnownHost. Even though the site was still on a “shared hosting” plan, the downtime issues immediately went away.

Fraud

Next up on the task list was to implement changes addressing the high levels of fraudulent credit card transactions being placed via the website. As I indicated earlier, these had become so bad that Hughes Precision’s payment processor halted transactions due to the issues. Fraud at this level was not quite as bad as having a website that was down for hours at a time, but not by much. Customers not being able to complete the checkout process means revenue goes to $0.

First change here was to turn off the open account registration policy for the website. This was changed to only allow new customer account creation as part of placing an order. The follow-up to this tweak was to install an anti-fraud plugin to assist with identifying fraudulent orders before they are sent to the payment processor.

There are quite a few anti-fraud plugins for WooCommerce, but we chose to go with YITH WooCommerce Anti-Fraud as it seemed to combine a good feature set with competitive pricing. So far, the plugin seems to be working well after we made a few tweaks to the initial default plugin settings to better handle our particular situation.

Site Content Issues

The remaining issues deal with site content and were numerous. For the remainder of this post I will refer to screenshots of both the old website and the new website to compare and contrast the changes that were made. Content areas of the website that I will discuss are outlined in green and numbered for easy reference on each screenshot; each screenshot can be clicked to bring up a full resolution version.

Homepage — Old Site

1. Site Top Header

The main change here is to get rid of the “Create Account” option to cut down on credit card fraud. When customer account creation is left wide open to all site visitors, the potential for fraud increases dramatically. Delaying customer account creation until after a purchase has been completed increases the number of steps (and corresponding effort and time) necessary for fraudsters to create a customer account. Additionally, account creation was made automatic after successful completion of the customer order.

2. Curious Phrasing

Throughout the old site there were curious choices of phrasing that negatively impacted readability. In the example highlighted here, “THREAD-ADAPTERS-CONVERSIONS-EXTENSIONS-BRAKES” is all caps (why is it necessary to shout?) as well as having hyphens substituted for spaces making for less “white space” between words. This makes for less than optimal readability and potentially negatively impacts SEO.

3. Uneven Layout, Images Too Small

In the grid layout featuring Hughes Precision product categories, the columns are uneven height and images are too small to fill the entire column width leaving edges of the column background on each side of the image (see “Target Scoring Gauges” and “Join the NRA”). Additionally, this page element combines multiple different topics: available products, FAQs & Info, “Join the NRA”, and “Where to Get My Barrel Threaded”. Site elements should contain targeted and related content and shouldn’t be a “grab bag” of loosely related content.

4. Useless & Huge List of Tags

The footer features an extensive list of product tags. The majority of these product tags are the names of other companies in the firearms industry. How is that helpful to the Hughes Precision customer?

5. Misspellings and Dead Links

Also in the site footer we see obvious typos (“offerts”) plus a footer navigation menu that is nothing but dead links. Again, useless to the customer.

6. Dead Social Media Links

Finally, the social media icons in the footer link to…nothing!

Improved Homepage — New Site

The overall layout has been changed from a “boxed” layout where the content has left and right padding to a “full-width” layout where content extends the full width of the browser window.  In particular, the aesthetic of the orange top header bar is improved by extending the full-width of the browser window instead of being artificially cutoff.

1. Product Quality Call-Outs

Instead of hard-to-read text and jumbles of images, the new homepage features call-outs for the high quality aspects of Hughes Precision products. These are “above the fold” of the homepage and are intended to grab the attention of the site visitor.

2. Consistent Grid of Product Category Links

Unlike the old website, the new homepage features a grid of images linking to each of the different categories of products sold by Hughes Precision. What was the point of only listing “Accessories”, “Gun Parts”, and “Target Scoring Gauges” when the catalog of Hughes Precision products included additional product categories? What was the logic of excluding the “Thread Adapter” product category from the list on the previous website? The Hughes Precision product catalog includes over 200 “Thread Adapters” which is a large proportion of the total of 300 products. Excluding that product category from the old website homepage made absolutely no sense.

Including all product categories ensures that customers are informed upfront of the range of products offered. No need to click thru deeper into the website to find that information (assuming a visitor to the old website even bothered doing that).

3. More Attractive Call-Outs for Additional Information

The new website also features more attractive call-outs for links to information such as warranty and return policies along with an invitation to wholesale customers to setup a wholesale account. Much more organized than the jumble of information on the old website.

4. Streamlined Footer

Dead links and useless information have been removed from the site footer. In their place are prominent images linking to the NRA and Red Oak Gunsmithing.

Product Page — Old Site

1. Color Palette Change

The old site included pages where the color palette inexplicably changed from orange to light blue. That is jarring for the site visitor.

2. Navigation Menu Layout

The navigation menu suffered from situations where it wrapped to a second line as seen here. Again, this is jarring for the site visitor.

3. Basic Product Filtering

The old site had a bare minimum of filtering options for products. The filtering options that were present work well enough, there just needed to be more filters corresponding to additional product specs (“attributes”).

4. Inconsistent Product Naming

Product names were inconsistent. As examples:

• thread standards were alternately referred to as 1/2″-28 or 1/2″x28
• some product names included thread “handedness” others did not (“left-handed” or “LH” as contrasted to “right-handed” or “RH”)
• some product names specified a “thread adapter” while others specified a “thread converter”; these are really the same basic product, just referred to by a different name
• some product names included “TPI” (“threads per inch”) while others did not
• etc

Product Page — New Site

1. Enhanced Product Filtering

The new site features greatly enhanced product filtering options beyond those offered on the old site. The new filters allow customers greater control over the criteria for selecting the product appropriate for their specific application. Implementing the new product filters required a complete overhaul of the product attributes used on the site (see Managing Product Categories, Tags, and Attributes in the WooCommerce documentation for more information on product attributes).

Additionally, short and concise help was added for each product filter (accessed by hovering over the icon next to each product filter). On the short list for future site upgrades is to add links to the filter help pointing to site pages with additional information regarding that specific product spec.

2. Extended Product Search

While the product search functionality of the old website was serviceable, much better options are available. The FiboSearch – AJAX Search for WooCommerce plugin was installed and customized to match the design of the new website. This plugin enables live search updating, a grid presentation of search results with the ability to add a product to the customer’s cart, as well as a search history.

The goal is to provide as many tools as possible to the customer so they can find what they’re looking for.

3. Consistent Product Naming

The majority of products were reviewed and assigned new names that followed a consistent naming convention. Thread standards were stated in a uniform manner (e.g., “1/2″×28”), handedness was included in all cases, product categories were standardized (“thread converter” is eliminated in favor of “thread adapter” in all cases), etc.

Having a consistent and logical product naming scheme helps the customer sort through a catalog of products more easily.

Generic Page — Old Site

1. Pages With Unrendered Shortcodes

A number of pages on the old site contained content that was obviously created using a “page builder” that was no longer installed on the website. This led to “gibberish” such as the “[fusion_builder_container…” section highlighted in green.

This was an unfortunate oversight of the previous site developer/administrator who made changes that removed the page builder that implemented the “[fusion_builder_container] shortcode and neglected to update the content that depended on that shortcode (the page builder in question is the one which comes with the Avada WordPress theme).

This is obviously a disaster for site readability and usability.

Generic Page — New Site

Generic pages on the new site now contain “human readable” content instead of unrendered shortcodes. The example shown here is a new page for the site which provides the user manuals of suppressors previously, but no longer, sold by Hughes Precision.

Conclusion

None of the above are particularly innovative or difficult implement; it just takes someone with the experience to know what needs to be done and how to research solutions to issues they haven’t dealt with in the past. One of the huge advantages of WordPress is the size of the user and developer communities. It is highly likely that whatever issue or problem you’re facing, someone else has dealt with the same issue or problem in the past and potentially posted a solution to the internet. Search is your friend…

Additionally, we need to choose our web hosting providers carefully. Hughes Precision was experiencing devastating downtime due to the inability of their previous web hosting provider to handle their site traffic. Its not easy sorting the “wheat” from the “chaff” in web hosting providers, but some general considerations can help:

• you often get what you pay for; “rock bottom” pricing often means “rock bottom” service
• look for a web hosting provider that can provide a range of hosting options from shared hosting all the way to dedicated servers; these are, in general, the web hosting providers with the most technical expertise
• get recommendations from trusted sources that have used a particular company’s web hosting services
• be wary of online web hosting “reviews”; most of these are actually paid advertisements (Web Hosting Talk can be a good independent source of web hosting reviews)

Making significant changes “on the fly” to a production website is not a good idea. The previous Hughes Precision site developer/maintainer made that mistake which resulted in unsupported shortcodes producing indecipherable content on the site. Make use of a “testing” or “staging” site when making large changes to your production website; once you have the large changes finalized, then, and only then, migrate them to the production website. There are various tools that can help with this although in most cases this can be done manually. If in the process of updating the production website things like unsupported shortcodes are unavoidable, then put the site into maintenance mode with a notice to site visitors explaining what is happening.

Finally, if you aren’t technically savvy and familiar with whatever website solution you’re using, track down an experienced and qualified person or business to help with the administration of your internet assets. However, be aware that you want to retain ownership of all your internet assets so you aren’t beholden to an individual or business that doesn’t have your best interests at heart (see my Do You Own Your Website? post for more on that topic).