The Project
Year Developed: 2022
Project Type: Search Engine Optimisation
Languages Used: HTML, CSS
The Background
Football Manager is one of the largest simulation games on the market, selling over one million units every year. It also contains one of the most vibrant, passionate and dedicated fan communities of any PC or console game. These fan communities are housed on a multitude of websites, all offering their expertise on different areas of the game.
The Brief
View From The Touchline was a website built on WordPress with content and design provided by third parties. The website ranked from average to very poor for Performance, Best Practices, SEO & Accessibility on Google’s Core Web Vital metrics. These scores are important indicators on things such as loading times and Search Engine Optimisation. Google uses these scores as a factor when ranking how highly a website appears in their search results. We were tasked with improving those scores for both desktop and mobile devices.
The Development
There were a number of factors that were affecting the low score. These ranged from some files taking a while to load, thus “blocking” the rest of the page from displaying, to things like wording on some links not being of good enough quality for screen readers.
WordPress has a number of high quality plugins that can improve these Core Web Vital scores but they are limited in what they can do. We deployed the use of a CDN that will modify and optimise the website on-the-fly meaning there was little to no other server configuration required. The WordPress theme that was being used was also improved by scaling back on un-needed code. The combination of direct code intervention and the use of a global CDN resulted in an exceptionally high score.
