How This Industry-Leading Fast-Food Franchise Boosted Their Website Performance with BlueRock Digital

The challenge: slow site speed resulting in high bounce rates 

Established in 2006, the Mad Mex franchise of Sydney-based Mexican fast-food restaurants offers fresh Mexican food made entirely of real ingredients. With over 60 locations nationwide, and no plans of slowing down, Mad Mex is quickly becoming a household name across Australia. Who doesn't love Mexican!

To provide their customers with the opportunity to order ahead, familiarise themselves with the menu, and learn more about the company and their story, Mad Mex launched the first iteration of their website. But, over time, while they focused on the speedy and successful delivery of their delicious food, Mad Mex’s slow, legacy website was unable to keep up with the demands of their growing clientele. 

When we were first approached by Mad Mex, their website took up a considerably large amount of disk space on their server (as a result of software, backups and content), resulting in a slow and frustrating user experience. The experience deflected hungry returning customers and new visitors who didn’t even hang around to view the menu. 

Issues with site speed and content loading not only impacted the customer experience, but it detracted potential franchisees from entering into business with the company. 

The solution: an optimised website to boost site speed and reduce bounce rate 

Taking a long-term and sustainable approach to the identified challenges, BlueRock Digital helped to: 

Perform a technical audit and website analysis 

BlueRock Digital commenced this project by first conducting a website analysis and technical audit of the legacy Mad Mex site.

This included:

• Reviewing Google Search Console for analysis of the site’s Core Web Vitals
• Leveraging several web performance benchmarking tools, including Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, PingDom, and Sucuri for a non-biased assessment
• Reviewing WordPress plugins and WordPress Core

Off the back of this analysis, BlueRock Digital presented findings and optimisation recommendations across:

• Server, hosting and network
• WordPress and plugins
• Content

From there, the team went back to Mad Mex with a roadmap and implementation plan to improve site speed and decrease bounce rates. Across these three categories, activities included:

• Creating a staging site and migrating Mad Mex’s servers/hosting to a dedicated, faster CPU
• Installing best-of-breed plugins for WordPress (like WP Rocket) and automating back-ups to ensure an approach for any rollback/security purposes
• Resizing and optimising assets, and employing lazy loading

Optimise the Mad Mex website 

BlueRock Digital worked collaboratively with the team at Mad Mex to implement technical and content updates that now provide customers and potential franchisees with a more responsive online experience. 

Completing the optimisation activities suggested by the initial website analysis and technical audit has resulted in a faster website, heightened security, and improved performance. This, of course, resulted in a more positive user experience, and has enabled the brand to amplify the offering and reach more potential customers than ever before. 

Ongoing monitoring and maintenance tasks

After performing the web optimisation for Mad Mex, BlueRock Digital has also continued to monitor the website and perform maintenance tasks on a monthly basis. 

Monthly reporting covers:

• Disk, user and resource capacity monitoring
• System updates
• CVE monitoring and patching for security purposes 
• Monthly recommendations

As part of this ongoing project, recommendations and updates have included:

• The installation of speed optimisation and security monitoring plugins
• The identification of an SEO poisoning hack, and the implementation of rollback to back up the site 
  
  

The results: 20x increased mobile page load speed and 3x increased desktop page load speed

By optimising Mad Mex’s website, the company was able to: 

• Improve the desktop PageSpeed score from 29 to 88 (Google PageSpeed)
• Improve the mobile PageSpeed score from 3 to 58 (Google PageSpeed)
• Reduce homepage load time from 13.84s to 1.59s, with a decrease in page size from 17.9MB to 3.8MB (Pingdom)
• Shorten the time taken for the server to generate an initial response from 7.8s to 238ms (GTMetrix)
  
  

Ready to bring your legacy website into 2022? 

If you’re struggling with high bounce rates and slow load times on your website, our team of specialists at BlueRock Digital can help optimise your site. Get in touch below to get started.