A Case Study on the Yard and Garden Website Migration

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Content Author:
Hannah Schultes

Transforming a Legacy Resource

Extension's Yard and Garden, formerly Horticulture and Home Pest News, has been a trusted source for information in the Iowa gardening community since its creation in 1987. Available on the web since 1998, this was the publication’s third major revamp. The focus is on providing relevant and accurate updates to home gardeners year after year. 

In this case study we'll recap some of the challenges we faced and how the lessons we learned improved the web platform that underlies the websites we maintain.

Goals for the migration:

  • Modernize - upgrading the website from the Drupal-7-based Luggage platform to the Sites+ platform based on Drupal 10 brought a better editing experience, modern tooling, and current security updates. Drupal 7 is no longer getting these critical updates after January 5, 2025.
  • Improve evergreen functionality - evergreen content is content that doesn't expire. Think pest information or tomato-growing tips. The Yard and Garden team needed a better way to highlight content that was written in the past but still valuable.
  • Optimize site navigation - a new navigation strategy was implemented to address the increasing use of mobile devices like cell phones, compete with others in the online gardening space and increase engagement - measured by time spent on the site.

A strategic approach to evergreen content

For a topic like gardening, it's common for articles to be relevant around the same time each year. Up until now, the information had come out in regular issues containing links to articles. The content had been organized like a news website, with the most recently written piece at the top. To get the timely news they had written in previous years to appear at the top of their lists, the content strategy for the Yard and Garden team had been to create a new post with a summary and a link to the past article. But this duplicated existing content and confused people who were searching for that topic.

lawn care example screenshots

 

To create less of this thin content, we created a new website structure that allows the Yard and Garden team to select which articles appear on their homepage. This "Timely Topics" feature consists of card blocks that can be updated as needed. The Yard and Garden team coordinates the topics with their Iowa Gardening News e-newsletter, allowing them to highlight the articles they feel are most relevant and drive traffic to their intended content.

 

timely topics screenshot

 

By rebuilding this process, we improved the health of their site, resulting in fewer pages with duplicate titles and body content. This is important because pages with similar content compete on search engine result pages (SERPs). Removing the duplicates means that Google can spend less time considering the thin content, and more time focusing on the new or evergreen content

Site navigation optimized for engagement

Our analytics review found that 85% of the Yard and Garden traffic came from search engines, and 90% of the visits to the site bounced, meaning they left after viewing one page. Most commonly, searchers were looking for answers to their gardening questions and would land on an article to find their answer. We wanted to organize the site so that visitors feel encouraged to continue browsing topics they are interested in after they arrive. Instead of a main navigation centered around resource type (encyclopedia, FAQs, how-tos, etc.), we created a menu comprised of gardening topics. So far, we've seen a small drop in bounce rate of 1.1% or about 32,000 fewer visits bouncing.

Navigating Website Traffic Challenges 

Some traffic loss is expected with any website redesign as returning visitors and search engines adjust to the changes. Our team took meticulous action to mitigate loss by adding redirects so that old URLs would still work, keeping an updated sitemap, and monitoring monthly reporting for performance changes. Still, by June, we began to see a significant traffic loss from search engines.

A timely rebrand

We considered many factors while determining the cause of this traffic loss. First, the Yard and Garden team had a significant rebrand. "Hort and Home Pest News" was a well-known community resource, but the team diligently communicated the new Yard and Garden moniker to key stakeholders. The new site launched on March 20, 2024. A 25% increase in direct traffic to the site in 2024 indicated that brand awareness not only prevailed but also benefited from this migration. Direct traffic is often a sign that visitors value your content. Instead of finding their answers in search engine summaries, they come directly to the source they trust most.

Search engine evolution

Google has a secret algorithm they use when determining which links to display for a searcher's query. While we don't know exactly how the algorithm works, Google gives some information to encourage the production of high-quality content for their searchers. In 2024, Google released multiple significant updates to their algorithm, focusing on searchers' intent and minimizing thin content produced by AI writers.

There was also the potential for traffic loss from the addition of AI search engines to consider, the impact of which still needs to be determined (Gartner predicts search traffic will drop 25% by 2026). However, with a consistent number of impressions from our keywords, we determined that the most likely cause of our traffic loss was changes to the layout of Google's search result pages, resulting in a lack of real estate available in Google search.

Take the search for "amaryllis".

Previous Google SERP

Current Google SERP


Previously, searchers could expect to see a couple of sponsored posts, followed by the linked results that Googled deemed worthy of satisfying the searcher's intent. Now, searchers are served an AI overview, sponsored posts, featured snippets (popular products, people also ask, things to know), and finally, organic traffic results. Most of the traffic coming to the Yard and Garden site is from  people at the beginning of their research journey looking for possible solutions. That means the content needs to rank high enough to be featured in one of the featured snippets or the AI overview!

Platform Review and Technical Enhancements

With the changes to search result layouts and the Google algorithm, our strategy for closing out the year was to make the site as technically healthy as possible. Fast loading times, few broken links, appropriately sized images and crawler-friendly sitemaps are a few examples of a technically healthy site. With this in mind, we began making improvements to our Sites+ platform that manages the Yard and Garden website.

Adding a duplicate title warning

Duplicate titles can make consuming content confusing. If two articles are titled "How To Start a Garden," how should consumers know which to click on? This is poor content management in the eyes of search engines. We introduced a warning so that those creating content would know a title was already taken. The editor is shown that the title already exists and is given the option to revise their title or override the warning.

 

Duplicate title warning

 

Improved heading structure

Web pages are made up of HTML (hypertext markup language). Using HTML heading tags when creating content is helpful for consumers and search engines when judging if the content is a good fit for their needs. Heading tags should follow a direct hierarchy when possible, with lower headings always beneath higher headings (e.g., H1, H2, H3, H2, H3, H3). Our team audited the platform features (such as news, blog, and events) and found areas where we could improve the heading structure. Changes were pushed platform wide.

Responsive image styles

Large image files are one of the top factors slowing down page load speed. Using responsive image styles means loading images specifically sized for the user's screen. Without it, images load at the largest size they may appear on the widest screen, even on mobile devices. We've added the necessary styles so that when content editors upload an image to our platform, the image dimensions are automatically cropped and resized. Doing this has improved our sites' landing page mobile performance.

Optimizing CSS

In addition to HTML, a web page has information about look and feel encoded into cascading style sheet (CSS) files. Our platform combines and compresses these files so they load as quickly as possible. Compression removes parts of the code helpful for developers, like comments, spaces, and line breaks, but are unneeded by the browser to render the page. An old platform bug was preventing us from preprocessing the CSS in certain situations. After a fix was added, we were able to deliver CSS files more quickly and efficiently.

Updates to video embed code

For media to be accessible, it needs an alternative text description for those who can't physically see it. Our video cards were missing this field, so we implemented a change that makes the title of the card the alternative description as well.

Valkey caching

When a web page is created many database queries are run to put the page together. Even if the page is stored in a database cache table after being built, the database must still be queried to retrieve it. We introduced an in-memory cache that makes any database queries at all unnecessary, significantly increasing the speed at which web pages are served. This makes the website feel more responsive and increases rankings with search engines, which prefer more performant sites over slow sites.

Sitemap pointer in robots.txt

The Sitemap is a tool that tells crawlers which pages on your website are important and should be indexed, or found. Sitemaps can be manually submitted to Google as needed, but best practice is to include the link in the site's robots.txt file since this is the first file a crawler inspects. This is the best way to ensure Google finds the Sitemap. We've implemented this improvement across all our websites.

Implementation

 

Yard and Garden Mobile Performance
Yard and Garden Homepage Mobile Performance Tracking

These improvements weren’t limited to the Yard and Garden website. Implementing these changes platform-wide benefits all our website owners with improved accessibility, site speed and performance, and content health. We've seen speed and accessibility improvements across the board, and plan to continue auditing our platform to stay competitive in the ever-changing search environment.

Like all sites, the Yard and Garden project is a work in progress. We've made great strides this year! We will leave you with a few indicators:

  • Average homepage load time improvement (6+ seconds to 1.1 seconds)
  • Increased direct traffic (+25%)
  • Enhanced user experience for site editors and visitors (-1.1% bounce rate)
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