Lightwire’s website upgrade delivers increased user experience

By Rohan Xavier, Jan 14 2019

Waikato and Bay of Plenty rural broadband provider Lightwire has seen a huge increase in Google organic search performance and website sessions since launching its website upgrade at the beginning of September this year.

The website upgrade, focused on bettering user experience, visitor directives, page consistency and showcasing of bespoke product offerings, has delivered increased performance for both existing and potential customers in its first three months to end of November 2018.

“As we have matured, we realised we could give or customers a better experience,” says Mike Cook, Lightwire’s Head of Rural.

“We do an excellent job of innovating rural broadband solutions, installing, maintaining and problem-solving for our customers, so it didn’t make sense that our online experience, both externally and internally was lacking.”

Lightwire enlisted its marketing partner, HGB, to manage the website upgrade and the Hamilton-based strategic marketing consultancy set to work redesigning, rebuilding and repopulating the site.

Statistics from the first three months of Lightwire’s new website show a 10% increase in sessions for the same period in 2017. New sessions have increased by 8%, new users are up 18% and sessions from Google organic search have increased by an outstanding 20%.

“We’re very happy with this result,” says HGB co-founder and strategic director Jacqui Gage-Brown.

“The old website worked but there was a lot of room for improvement. There was an overall lack of user experience on the site, which we were able to correct by focusing on the most direct pathway to an end action. For example, potential customers landing on the site, accessing Lightwire’s product offerings and taking action to check their coverage.”

Through a strategic redesign, HGB was able to implement consistency of look and feel throughout the pages, resulting in better UX.

“Lightwire also has a great range of bespoke products and services that needed showcasing, so we provided SEO-focused content around these and continue to provide this,” says Gage-Brown.

Delivering rural broadband to over 5,500 homes and businesses across rural Waikato and Bay of Plenty, Cook says the theme for the year has been ‘upgrades’, which is giving Lightwire customers a better experience across its network.

“We’ve upgraded 47 of our broadband towers around the Waikato and Bay of Plenty in the past 12 months, with more scheduled upgrades to start in the new year and we’ve now upgraded our website,” says Cook.

“We feel the final product is outstanding and fits our purpose of growing our rural broadband base throughout our rural communities.”