Hip2Keto
Refining User Experience and Functionality for Hip2Keto
Hip2Keto helps millions of readers rocking the Keto lifestyle with low-carb recipes, keto diet tips and deals, product reviews and a supportive community of people seeking to better their health through the ketogenic way of life. Led by Collin Morgan, the Hip2Keto team follows the keto diet, which adds an expressive layer of credibility to the website that has been scaling since its launch in 2018.
Some time ago, Trew Knowledge was responsible for building a stable and secure WordPress Multisite network to anchor Hip2Save and Hip2Keto in an optimized environment on the WordPress VIP cloud-based hosting.
The custom WordPress theme developed by TK and shared through the network allows for seamless customizations without ever compromising the speed or performance of none of the sites.
Growing fast in the number of followers and subscriptions, Hip2Keto has undergone a recent refreshment. The overall plan looked at a complete makeover of the parent theme into a unique child theme, making it more on-brand for Hip2Keto readers while enhancing overall functionality.
UX Improvements
As the engineering partner, TK had the challenge of focusing the design makeover project on improving the user experience and ad management, while leveraging the current theme and building on its features, updating how the content was displayed throughout the site to achieve an optimal, and streamlined customer journey.
Some features included the introduction of Trending Now content that leverages WordPress statistics to uncover and publish the most popular posts.
In addition to the strategic approach of reshaping the ad experience, the enhancements also focused on some key UX features such as:
– Super header – A customizable CTA header for the team to promote content
– Simplified Login – Transformation of Login and Save Recipes to modals for frictionless access
– Dynamic, time-sensitive content – Featured Top Viewed banner content displaying up to 20 items with fluid scroll
– Recipe features – Highlighting CTA’s for recipes and cross-promoted content
– Category result customizations – Levering category headers with dynamic recipes content on desktop and mobile-first recipe experience for mobile devices
– Enhanced user acquisition – Custom CTA sign-up block for strategic placements
– Footer makeover
Optimizing revenue
As many sites rely on ad revenue, it is important to optimize the opportunities for driving targeted and profitable revenue from traffic. Therefore, sponsored recipe blocks were created to optimize the website revenue and create new opportunities to capture ad revenue by increasing the inventory on the site.
In addition to the visibility of the ads, the most important factor was speed and performance of the site, to ensure that a site with primary ad inventory, and native advertising, would load quickly and optimize the quality of ads for users. Therefore, speed testing, optimizations, and reduced load time became a priority in optimizing revenue across the site.
Multisite benefits
With the revised layout of sponsored ad content, and flexibility to create inventory placements, we created opportunities for more visible ads and affiliate tagging. All of which was built into the child theme of the parent, and managed through a centralized multisite instance to manage features, components, plugins and contributor access.
By leveraging the multisite network, Hip2Keto also benefits from the optimizations and accessibility enhancements.
Child theme variations
As enterprise requirements continue to evolve and the number of properties for organizations grows to support a unique look and feel, in addition to variable components of a design system, child themes provide an opportunity to leverage the existing design system components, or Gutenberg block libraries, across sites.
With this convenience of making a larger design system available for smaller sites, we introduced variations of blocks to support various child sites. By incorporating variations to a block layout, we unlock the potential to expand child site themes with more customization options at the block level.
Altogether, we empower our clients to invest in their library of tools and options, to build unique customer experiences that drive revenue.
