Thanda Group (Website Speed)

Design & Development, Search Engine Optimization

Thanda Group started with the grand vision of Thanda’s founder and owner, Swedish IT entrepreneur Dan Olofsson, who had a compelling desire to become part of Africa and make a longstanding commitment to it.

In Africa he found the people, environment and wildlife so special and captivating that in 2002 he founded the Thanda Group, which today includes three extraordinary hospitality experiences, an unparalleled real estate offering, and many long-term conservation initiatives, educational and skill advancement programmes, as well as community partnerships.

52.17%

Improvement in Site Loading Time for Thanda Profile

21.37%

Improvement in Average Session Duration for Thanda Safari

10.09%

Improvement in Bounce Rate for Thanda Island

Thanda Group (Website Speed)

Design & Development, Search Engine Optimization

Thanda Group started with the grand vision of Thanda’s founder and owner, Swedish IT entrepreneur Dan Olofsson, who had a compelling desire to become part of Africa and make a longstanding commitment to it.

In Africa he found the people, environment and wildlife so special and captivating that in 2002 he founded the Thanda Group, which today includes three extraordinary hospitality experiences, an unparalleled real estate offering, and many long-term conservation initiatives, educational and skill advancement programmes, as well as community partnerships.

52.17%

Improvement in Site Loading Time for Thanda Profile

21.37%

Improvement in Average Session Duration for Thanda Safari

10.09%

Improvement in Bounce Rate for Thanda Island

Brief & Objectives

Ruby Digital currently runs monthly SEO management for Thanda Island and Thanda Safari and saw that site speeds needed an improvement. So we suggested this multisite separation for Thanda as their websites were slow due to four websites being on the same server. Our aim was to see an improvement in the sites speed performance and hopefully improve the user experience.

Challenges

The challenge was that the Thanda website was hosted on a server in the USA that was a WordPress multisite—one server serving 4 websites.

To improve site speed, we proposed splitting all four sites into individual sites on their own performance hosting servers in South Africa.

This project took longer than expected due to some issues that arose when moving the domains onto our server. The previous hosting provider of the client ran into technical difficulties, but we were able to overcome these challenges and complete the project successfully.

Our Solution

We successfully executed the task of separating the Thanda multisite into four individual websites, each residing on their own dedicated server, aimed at improving the overall speed performance of the site and ensuring a seamless and fast browsing experience for the users.

The separation process was carried out with precision, preserving all the essential data. The end result is a notable improvement in the speed of the site, which has led to an enhanced user experience, lower bounce rates, and longer average session durations.

We also added Cloudflare for CDN (Content Delivery network) and improved site speed by optimising all images and using individual cache setups per website.

Our team is proud of this achievement and continues to work towards delivering optimal website performance for our clients.

Results

We were able to improve the overall performance of the website by reducing the LCP time to less than 2 seconds. This is typically the time when the website above the fold must be loaded.

We have reduced the total loading time for all 4 websites to be lower than 6 seconds. For travel websites, an average of +6 seconds is normal for the page to be loaded, so we are above the industry benchmark. We saw an improvement in the first loading point, which dropped below 2 seconds instead of the previous 2.5-4 seconds.

Comparing our SEO client Thanda Safari’s 3 months before the site separation and 3 months after the site separation: We saw a 21.37% improvement in the average session duration and a 7.86% improvement in bounce rate.

Comparing our SEO client Thanda Island’s 3 months before the site separation and 3 months after the site separation: We saw a 6.27% improvement in the average session duration and a 10.09% improvement in bounce rate.

For the Thanda Portfolio, the site speed improved by 52.17%.

Since the separation, the sites have seen good results in terms of speed improvement:

Thanda Island before:

Thanda Island after:

Thanda Safari before:

Thanda Safari after:

Thanda Portfolio before:

Thanda Portfolio after:

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