Catalyst 14

The challenge

Catalyst 14 is a boutique UK coaching and mindfulness consultancy. Their old website, created on a leading drag-and-drop web-builder platform, lacked the speed, functionality and mobile responsiveness for a truly competitive edge.

On the advice of a digital marketing expert, the firm decided to move to a new WordPress site to improve user experience, increase search rankings and scale up its content.

The move coincided with the launch of Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV), a new set of specific factors on user-experience which is vital for any site’s ongoing visibility and ranking in browsers.

The new site needed to replicate as exactly as possible the attractive familiar design of the original site but with future-proof flexible features to serve the Catalyst 14 team through future iterations of SEO.

The solution

Although technically a site rebuild, the primary objective of the project was to provide a fast and responsive site to Core Web Vitals standards. It also needed to be easy for the Catalyst 14 marketing agency to maintain.

We developed a bespoke theme using the WordPress block editor. This mirrored and enhanced the original design but had priority emphasis on speed and technical performance, security and SEO.

Part of the build requirement included a CRM integration with Mailchimp and the facility to maintain existing password protection for course content.

We incorporated a number of hidden-navigation landing pages for effective lead conversion from pay-per-click (PPC), which was the main source of traffic to the existing site.  

Every element of the website was optimised for CWV. This included improving the site’s accessibility standing by using appropriate colours and fonts.

The results

With CWV, Google uses real world usage data to assess a URL for user experience. It applies a ranking boost/penalty based on whether a site reaches its threshold.

Our hard work on this paid off. Page load speed on both desktop and mobile is fast, even with a video homepage banner. Two years after launch, the Catalyst 14 site still consistently passes CWV and ranks highly for key search phrases.

Anecdotal comments about the user experience have been positive, particularly on mobile. We now routinely apply the CWV learnings from this project to builds for other clients.