Client Snapshot: Traverse City Downtown Development Authority

Traverse City’s Downtown Development Authority (DDA) engaged with Oneupweb in 2018 for a website redesign. Ever since, they’ve had a website maintenance retainer agreement to keep up with the city’s evolving needs.

Scope of Work

Oneupweb’s support for Traverse City DDA has included:

• Website Design and Development
  • dda.downtowntc.com
  • downtowntc.com
  • parking.downtowntc.com
• Website Maintenance Retainer
  • Web Performance Audit
  • Monthly Checks and Site Updates

Recent Technical Optimizations

During regular website updates and maintenance, our web developers found that performance and optimization could be improved. When metrics such as Core Web Vitals (i.e., speed and visual stability) are suffering, user experience and search engine performance can suffer too – especially after May 2021.

So we took action:

• Updated WP Rocket caching plugin and adjusted configuration
• Added Contact Form 7 optimizations to only enqueue scripts when a form is included on a page
• Enabled data compression on the server to optimize content delivery
• Reduced webfont enqueue file size and enqueued scripts progressively
• Optimized upload folders
• Resolved JavaScript errors
• Ensured proper image sizes on pages

The Results

Daily average load times have greatly decreased (350% improvement) over last year’s page load times.

Faster load times mean visitors do not leave the site as quickly. This sends engagement signals to search engines, eventually resulting in better ranking positions for relevant keywords.

Here’s what our SEO team noticed:

• The average position for the term “Traverse City” moved up to 6, from 13, in six months (a 54% improvement). This translated to a 117% lift in clicks to the DDA website for this important search term.
• The average position for the term “Downtown Traverse City” moved up to 1, from 4, within twelve months (75% improvement).
• The average position for all keywords moved up to 14, from 18, within 12 months (22% improvement).

Interested in getting results like this for your website? Reach out online or call (231) 922-9977.