Force Cancer Charity

Force Cancer Charity

Force Cancer Charity is an Exeter based cancer support charity. Their cancer support centre is based on the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital Wonford site and offers patients and their loved ones physical, emotional, psychological and practical support. They also offer support and information and fund the delivery of chemotherapy in Okehampton, Tiverton and Honiton.

Background

The Force Cancer website had been built using a page builder plugin, normally reserved for people with no web design experience looking to build their own websites. With the complex features required on the Force Cancer site, the page builder and overuse of plugins to add basic functionality was causing all manner of issues both with usability on the front end and various things breaking on the backend.

The website was on a very slow server, not fit for the large volume of traffic the website was receiving. Bandwidth issues were causing downtime and stopping visitors getting the support information and advice they needed. Contact form emails hadn’t been configured properly and weren’t always being received.

The Brief

Force Cancer initially needed advice and web development support to help fix various issues with their website. This involved providing development support on some initial fixes but also to plan for future work and continued improvements. Priority Pixels were asked to look at the following:

• Website design & development
  A general assessment of the website. Tidy up and remove any unused or unnecessary plugins. Bug fixes.
• Website Hosting
  Migrate the website to a new cloud based server. Optimise the server for fast content delivery. Fix issues with contact form email delivery.
• SEO Audit
  A full SEO audit. Looking at all aspects of on-site SEO, off-site SEO, user experience, content analysis and competitor analysis.

The Process

After conducting an initial audit of the Force Cancer website we discovered a vast number of plugins had been used to build the website. Some offered important functionality for the events area and contact forms, but others were either doing basic things which could have been handled better or weren’t needed at all.  After a thorough review of these plugins we deactivated and removed all that weren’t needed. Then worked through the rest of the plugins removing any that could be dealt with more efficiently. In doing so, we managed to removed a number of unnecessary scripts from loading on the front end which resolved some of the errors the site was having, along with speeding up the sites overall load time.

Once we fixed these initial issues we migrated the website to our cloud server. This involved taking a full site backup of all the websites files and MySQL database. Once on our cloud server, a staging environment was created (something the Force Cancer site hadn’t had up until now) allowing us to make changes to the website without impacting the live pages.

Since migrating the Force Cancer website to Priority Pixels we have continued to support the websites ongoing development with a number of new features. We have also recently completed an SEO audit to help guide the Force Cancer team with SEO related activities. Priority Pixels are currently redeveloping the events area of the website, to help improve functionality and remove the old resource heavy events plugin.

Find out more

If you would like to find out more information on how Priority Pixels can help support your website, contact us today! Email us on hello@prioritypixels.co.uk, or call our team on 01626 245061.