After discovering the stunning results of our previous case study, we decided profiling the results of a new web design on a regular basis would be a good idea. Today we're going to look at David's of Port Dover, a fine dining establishment located in picturesque Port Dover, Ontario.  As always, this is not a claim or guarantee of results if you work with us, just a case study of one of our clients and the benefits they've seen from redeveloping their website with Lifeline.   The new David's website was launched at the end of May / beginning of June of this year and we started hosting their website at the beginning of April, so that's where our statistical data begins. This time around, we have about 5 months of data to work with.

When David's originally contracted us, the largest overriding issue their site had was that it was beginning to show its age. It had a splash page (an initial page on a website that provides no real information other than a link to enter the main site) and this, among other structural issues, was likely the cause of their starting bounce rate.

Let's take a look at the breakdown of their statistics:

Starting in March and April, everything remains fairly consistent. It's fairly normal to have a little bit of variation (up or down) from month to month in your traffic statistics.  We started hosting the site a few days into March, so the March stats are a bit lower as well because they are missing those days. So, with around 913 visits and  440 of those visits coming from search engines, the site was doing fairly decently for its service area.  The bounce rate of around 60% is not amazing, and there is definitely room for improvement there.

In May the site was gearing up for launch; much of the extra traffic came from Lifeline as well as the client accessing the new site to build, tweak, and approve the new content while the old site was still the live front. There was a slight increase in search engine traffic as well, likely from pages of the  new website getting indexed by Google as it crawled the pages for the new website.

June and July come along as the first two months with the new site launched. There's a noticeable increase in traffic, including traffic coming from search engines, as well as a drop in the bounce rate. There is a bit of variation between the two months, but as I mentioned before this is completely normal in statistics, so without further ado, let's compare the statistics from the old site versus the new.

Traffic:

As you can see,  with the old David's site was getting around 900 visitors per month; this new site launch has doubled that traffic up to around 1800 visits.  Fantastic results to be sure -- who wouldn't be happy with literally doubling the amount of traffic that comes to their website?  However,  just like our previous case study, the news only gets better as we move on to the search engine results.

Search Engine  Traffic:

Much like Ariss Valley, David's is starting to get found through generic search terms (like "restaurant in port dover" for which they are the second  organic listing). This type of search traffic, which was almost non-existent on their old site,  is more valuable than searches for your company name because in most cases it means the visitors aren't already familiar with your website and are learning about your business for the first time. Their new site is now getting over triple the amount of traffic from search engines, and in fact this is where a large majority of the new traffic is coming from.

Bounce Rate:

As a quick reminder,  the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who left almost as soon as they came to the website, and likely didn't read or find much (if any) information. David's initial bounce rate wasn't as bad as the previous site we looked at, so the results aren't as dramatic, but the new website still resulted in about a 60% decrease in the bounce rate. Which means 60% of the visitors who were previously leaving the site without spending enough time to learn anything about David's of Port Dover are now staying on the site longer. Definitely good news!

This brings us to the completion of our second case study... stay tuned for more!