HESC Website Rebuild

Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) is an Australian power project that needed a simple website rebuild. As a partner of Cox Inall Dentsu, MRKWP was selected to complete the website rebuild. Cox Inall Dentsu is an MRKWP partner agency, that specializes in public relations and behaviour change.

The main requirements for the rebuild were:

  1. Be easy to edit and maintain
  2. Be fast loading
  3. Be SEO ready
  4. High website security and protection

HESC Challenge

The HESC website was very slow, outdated, and difficult to update and manage.
Here’s a report on the size, performance, and speed metrics before we rebuilt the website: the GTmetrix report.

The page was using the old version of WordPress and Divi page builder. This made maintenance very difficult and updating the page impossible for the marketing team.

Our Solution

After understanding the challenges, we knew that HESC required a quick solution that worked well and was affordable.

Hydrogen Supply Chain Video Case Study

These are the tools we used to rebuild the HESC website to achieve the best value for the budget.

1. Blocksy Theme with Child Theme

We started with the Blocksy theme to rebuild the HESC website. Blocksy is a lightweight, feature-rich, and block-based WordPress theme. This theme is responsive and loads fast, making it a great choice for the HESC site rebuild.

2. Gutenberg Page Builder with Stackable Blocks

We then used the Gutenberg page builder and Stackable blocks to rebuild the pages.
Gutenberg gives pages visual intuitiveness without any additional code. In addition, it has lightweight HTML, which needs no additional PHP server process. This would improve HESC site load time.

3. GES Security and WP Engine Hosting

HESC being an energy solution and a government project, security was paramount.
We used WP Engine and Global Edge Security to improve the HESC website security. GES is is an advanced security solution that comes with DDoS protection and a Web Application Firewall. (WAF).

WP Engine is among the top-rated, WordPress hosting solutions. It offers excellent uptime, daily backups, great customer service, and many more features. With these tools in place, the website security was resolved and secured.

4. WP Defender

Another essential security plugin was WP Defender. This tool gives security to clients’ login credentials. In addition, it provides lockouts and two-factor authentication for the website.
We wanted to ensure that the HESC website was free from untraceable vulnerabilities and other online intrusions.

5. Cloudflare CDN 

The next vital tool we used was the Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN). We wanted to improve how website pages are delivered to web visitors. Cloudflare is good at this with its faster file delivery. It has a distributed group of servers that ensure fast delivery of Internet content, including HTML pages and images.

6. Yoast SEO

Finally, we improved the website’s SEO by using the Yoast SEO plugin. The most important things to look at were the meta tag and site map management.

HESC Website Results

Rebuilding the HESC website reduced its page size, giving it a loading time of less than 1s.
The improved loading time implies the site is now easier to use, mobile-friendly, and easier to update. Below are the metrics for webpage size and speed before and after the rebuilding process.

Check out the final GTmetrix report here.

Key Areas of Improvement
Page SizePerformanceLoading Time
Before3MBs50%2.1s
After1MB89%290ms
HESC Website metrics before and after the rebuild.
Key Performance Metrics and Improvements in Load Speed
  1. Average webpage size reduced by 66.7%
  2. Average performance increased by 48.8%
  3. Loading time improved by 86.2%

New HESC Website

Check out the new Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain website. It’s fast, mobile friendly and looks fantastic!