Boosting SEO Performance: How Duda and Solocal Collaborated to Optimize 40,000 Websites
When Google introduced the Core Web Vitals update in 2021, Duda took care of the technical aspects to ensure that Solocal’s client websites could achieve high rankings.
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100 SEO optimized websites delivered per week
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80,2% of websites ranking for at least one local query
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72% of non-migrated websites ranking as "Good" on Core Web Vitals
"Our Clients Aim for Pole Position"
Solocal, a leading digital solutions provider in France, empowers small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to thrive online. Serving a diverse clientele that includes restaurants, plumbers, home builders, electricians, and house painters, Solocal understands that its clients often lack the time and expertise to manage their websites effectively.
"Our clients have one point in common: they don't have the time to take care of their websites," says Jérémy Wyler, SEO Manager at Solocal.
Local SEO is particularly crucial for Solocal's clients, as over 40% of searches on their websites are local searches. This also means that they compete for highly competitive keywords.
"Great SEO performance is one of our first objectives to make our clients happy. They want to be in the pole position, they want to be #1 in Google. And we know Duda is impeccable in taking care of all our websites' technical aspects," says Jérémy.
A Major Challenge: Core Web Vitals
Since 2018, Solocal has relied on the Duda platform to build and manage its websites. Solocal transitioned to Duda after years of building websites in-house in order to streamline operations and offer ongoing innovation to their customers. Check out the full story!
Today, Solocal manages over 40,000 websites, ranging from basic one-pagers to complex data-driven sites. With a team of more than 300 professionals, including webmasters, developers, and designers, they build over 100 unique websites per week.
However, in 2021, Solocal faced a significant challenge with the introduction of Core Web Vitals (CWV) as a ranking factor by Google. It became essential to ensure that thousands of Solocal websites performed well in terms of CWV.
"We strive for excellence in content and technical SEO, including Core Web Vitals. It matters for our clients, and we just want to provide the best customer experience possible to the end users," emphasizes Jérémy.
Solocal looked to Duda to make sure all of their client sites would meet the new benchmark for website performance.
Duda's Journey to Becoming the Leader in Core Web Vitals
Duda recognized the significance of Core Web Vitals in 2020 when Google first released them to quantify user experience. Since then, Duda has prioritized these metrics.
“Core Web Vitals are tough to keep on top of if you’re updating individual sites, but the impact on performance is significant. We have been working hard to take one more thing off of digital marketing agencies' plates so they can focus on delivering the best results for their clients," says Amir Glatt, CTO and Co-Founder of Duda.
Duda formed a dedicated team and devised a methodology to ensure that over 1 million websites built on their platform scored high on Core Web Vitals. The process involved collecting data for all websites, analyzing it, identifying improvement opportunities, implementing necessary changes, and closely monitoring the results.
Notable improvements included:
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Largest Contentful Paint: Duda sites now prioritize content to ensure that the most important items load first. This includes using lazy loading and collaborating with cookie consent programs to make them less intrusive during site loading.
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Cumulative Layout Shift: Duda worked specifically with partners to address custom widget issues, a major cause of Cumulative Layout Shift. Other improvements involved resolving font load issues by inlining above-the-fold fonts and optimizing images to the correct ratios. These efforts increased the number of Duda sites ranking as "Good" in CWV from 46% to 76%.
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First Input Delay: Duda optimized long-running JavaScript tasks by breaking them into smaller chunks using Chrome developer tools. As a result, over 98% of Duda sites now pass the First Input Delay metric.
According to the HTTPArchive, Duda has consistently outperformed competitors by over 20% in CWV performance since September 2021, making it the leading platform. The report shows that over 70% of Duda sites rank high in Core Web Vitals.
Building a Web Performance Culture
While Duda worked to improve the performance of all websites, the Solocal team realized that the impact varied among their migrated websites, which were originally built on legacy platforms. These sites faced challenges with the Cumulative Layout Shift metric, with only 20% of them passing the CWV tests.
Jérémy Wyler explains, "At that time, we hadn't fully ingrained a web performance culture into our processes and development." Consequently, Solocal had to individually address performance issues on the migrated websites to rectify the situation.
Today, 61% of all Solocal websites rank as "Good" on CWV. Among the non-migrated websites, 72% pass in all the three CWV metrics. The overall SEO performance of Solocal's websites is impressive: 96,3% rank in the top 10 organic results for at least one query, and 80,2% rank for at least one local query.
"Thanks to Duda, all our website templates are optimized for Core Web Vitals and SEO in general. Duda takes care of the technical optimization, freeing us from numerous constraints and limitations," concludes Jérémy.
