Increasing performance for better speed and usability
As mentioned, a big effort was made to increase the performance of this iteration of the website compared with the last. From a back-end code perspective this involved moving towards using ‘repositories’ and ‘service’ classes to funnel the retrieval of data via single channels, which allowed us to optimise retrieval and cache performance in a small number of places. From a front-end code perspective, we continued to improve our front end file optimisations, compilation and delivery, as well as improving our delivery of imagery formats, ensuring that the high resolution imagery used across the site is optimised and served in the latest generation image formats (webp in this case).
Another aspect of the website build was improving our implementation of third-party systems into the website. For example, we previously integrated with Salesforce, pushing leads in the Salesforce platform via ‘web-to-lead' requests, whereas we now utilise Salesforce’s direct API endpoints, meaning better performance, more control and flexibility when making requests, and more visibility when debugging potential problems.