Paper Transport LLC (Paper Transport) is a for-hire truckload carrier that offers regional truckload, dedicated truckload, intermodal, and logistic services. Headquartered in De Pere, WI with multiple park locations/terminals throughout the Midwest and Southern United States, PTL has experienced tremendous growth since its start in 1990 and now employs over 850 professional Class A CDL Truck Drivers along with over 200 driver support professionals.
Paper Transport LLC's New WordPress Website Features Excellent Page Speed Performance and Easy Updates
The Paper Transport website did a fantastic job of showcasing the company’s high-capacity hauling and shipping solutions via a user friendly design, but the site struggled to load quickly. Analytics showed that users dropped off because of the slow load times, and the Paper Transport team was concerned about its effect on their search engine optimization efforts. They turned to the digital experts at Northwoods for advice and assistance on how to tackle the problem with speed – one of Google’s Core Web Vitals..
The Situation
- Paper Transport’s WordPress website was returning page speed results in the 60-70 range using Google’s Lighthouse tool, indicating significant room for improvement. (Lighthouse scores in the 90-100 range are considered good; 50-89 indicates improvements are needed; <50 is poor.) To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to score in the 90-100 range.\
- The Paper Transport team was very concerned about its site speed performance and wanted to improve it significantly in order to keep users engaged, drive more business, and improve SEO performance.
- In addition to page speed performance issues, Paper Transport was frustrated with how difficult it was to make simple updates to the site.
- Although Paper Transport had worked with a different vendor to build its website initially, the team had chosen Northwoods to provide hosting, analytics, and Worry-Free WordPress services, which include monthly updates to the WordPress core, theme, and plugins.
The Solution
- Because Paper Transport was very happy with the services and advice they received from Northwoods, they asked our team to provide recommendations for how to fix their site speed issues.
- The Northwoods WordPress team dug into the site and determined that the site’s design theme had a lot of unnecessary code that was causing the majority of the site speed issues. Unfortunately, reducing code bloat within the theme that was being used wasn’t possible.
- So Northwoods recommended two options: a complete site redesign using a different design theme that didn’t include unnecessary code, or a total rebuild using a different page builder tool but the same design (without the offending theme).
- Paper Transport chose to rebuild the site completely, using the same design but without the previous theme and with Northwoods recommended tools, including Beaver Builder – a user-friendly page builder tool – which would make updates much easier.
The Outcome
- As soon as the new site launched, page speed performance improved to 92 in Lighthouse, which is exactly in the preferred 90-100 score range.
- The new site is now easier than ever to manage and update thanks to the user-friendly tools on which the site is built. The Paper Transport team was also set up for success with Northwoods’ one-on-one training, complete with a customized guide and access to online “how-to” resources.
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