Guns.com

Development, Maintenance & Support

Guns.com approached me to help maintain and build out new initiatives on their enterprise level WordPress site. With tens of thousands of visitors a day, they needed an expert.

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I. Stabilizing the Codebase

When I inherited the project, the codebase needed help. It had switched hands several times: features had been added without documentation and the Git repo was not being maintained. It was clear that I needed to stabilize things and get a clear understanding of how the site worked.

After a couple months, I had the site in much better working order with an up to date Git repo, commented code and a good understanding of how the site was put together. This foundational work helped solve a lot of issues that came up later.

II. Site Speed

Speed matters for all sites, but in publishing it is especially important. Guns.com was suffering from a serious speed issue that was affecting its performance with users and search results. There wasn’t a single thing that was causing the problems, but over the course of a few months I was able to diagnose the various issues at play and get the site back to its fighting weight.

III. SEO & Analytics

To help increase traffic, I was assigned several very specialized tasks that involved working closely with Google’s suite of products to track various user activity on the site, including setting up a tool to track the percentage of users blocking ads. The site also had an issue where there were many legacy links from other sites that were 404ing, I setup a complex set of redirect rules that could capture all the traffic.

At the end of this process, the issues that Google had identified in its Webmaster Suite were resolved and traffic from search engines was up by several percentage points.

Conclusion

At the end of the engagement, Guns.com was in excellent shape and ready to begin a new phase of life with a dedicated development team to build out larger features that were beyond the scope of my smaller retainer role. Throughout the process I gave detailed updates and at the project’s end, helped onboard the new developers.

I was determined to leave things in much better shape than I received them, and I succeeded.

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