Corporate Hospitality Aims for Faster Food

The Problem

ezCater makes it easy for businesses to find and hire hospitality professionals for corporate events. But their users were experiencing slow site load times. Meanwhile, the company was also struggling to customize follow-up communications.

ezCater's Plan

To continue their meteoric growth, ezCater needed to overhaul their top-of-funnel experience.

A faster site would be a better experience for new users, and it would increase brand visibility through improved SEO (search engines penalize slow-loading websites)
A more flexible email marketing platform with easily accessible analytics would allow ezCater’s marketers to optimize communications with prospects and customers.

Traps and Challenges

Site speed – lazy loading images and videos, plus poor performance with screen readers meant ezCater’s website scored low for accessibility and SEO on the lighthouse scale (getting 40s and 50s out of 100).

Email marketing – the existing Action Mailer platform was too hard for marketers to use. It prevented them from trying new templates, or accessing performance metrics like CTR.

How We Fixed Things

Echobind sped up the site by:

switching from JavaScript to CSS, which reduced the main thread work
setting a width and height for all images
adding unique IDs to elements
deferring Google Maps and Liberty Chat until users interacted with the site
pre-connecting to Google Fonts
adding aria labels to elements for screen readers.

And we migrated their Action Mailer system to SendGrid, which made it easier for ezCater’s marketers to implement new email designs and layouts. It also gave them analytics tools to assess and iterate those new approaches.

Signs of Success