Performance Matters: A Deep Dive Into the Revamp and Optimization of the Veritone.com Website

Veritone, a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and technologies to solve and transform audio, video, and other data sources into actionable intelligence, was experiencing performance and scalability issues with its corporate website. These issues were affecting the end-user experience and hindering their marketing team’s ability to reach its goals effectively.

Veritone understands the critical need for an engaging enterprise-scale B2B corporate website that ensures an optimal experience for users on an ongoing basis. Site performance is essential to the brand experience and user engagement between Veritone and its customers, prospects, investors, and potential hires, and correlates directly with the overall effectiveness of marketing efforts. A recent Niel Patel article stated that “a one-second delay in page load time could result in up to a 7% reduction in conversions.”

To fix these issues and apply best practices for performance and other experience-critical aspects such as security and SEO, Veritone partnered with Clear Digital, a digital agency specializing in B2B websites and digital brand experiences.

To fix these issues and apply best practices for performance and other experience-critical aspects such as security and SEO, Veritone partnered with Clear Digital, a digital agency specializing in B2B websites and digital brand experiences.

Finding the right strategy to improve website performance and executing that strategy is crucial to brand experience, marketing goals, and bottom-line success.

A Thorough Website Audit

The first step in the process was to conduct a thorough website audit to identify the root causes of the performance and scalability issues. Clear Digital team of UX and engineering experts performed a discovery process that meticulously analyzed and benchmarked the current website in the following categories:

• Usability
• Backend ease of use
• Performance
• Security
• SEO
• Hosting Infrastructure
• Code deployment process

Clear Digital consolidated the audit results and recommendations into three main actionable categories for improvement: Performance, Security, and SEO.

Performance Optimization: Speed Sells

Website speed and performance are crucial for B2B marketing for several reasons. Firstly, a slow website can negatively impact the user experience, leading to a higher bounce rate and lower conversion rates. This can be particularly damaging for B2B businesses, as the sales cycle is often long and requires more engagement from potential customers. In addition, search engines like Google prioritize websites with fast loading times in their desktop and mobile rankings. A slow website can also impact a company’s search engine visibility and organic traffic.

And lastly, website speed and performance are increasingly important for mobile users as solution discovery, and decision-making on mobile websites continue to increase. A slow website can lead to a frustrating experience for mobile users, who are more likely to abandon the website and look elsewhere.

Pantheon WebOps Platform Example

• Checking logs and clearing all errors
• Adding better cache plugins and mechanisms
• Optimizing images and videos for load time
• Cleaning up memory or process-intensive plugins and functions
• Optimizing database structure
• Minimizing Javascript and CSS
• Integrating 3rd party tracking codes into Google Tag Manager
• Changing the UX and code structure of the mega menu
• Changing the UX and code structure of the footer menu

Clear Digital also leveraged its partnership with Pantheon, known for its fast and reliable hosting with features such as global CDN and edge caching, to move the website to its purpose-built WebOps platform. The hosting move simplified the website update process, integrated a CDN, provided a solution for disaster recovery, and created a multi-dev environment for Veritone and Clear Digital engineers.

Security Optimization: Establishing Trust

Website security is essential for B2B marketing because it helps to build trust with potential customers and partners. Trust is particularly important in the B2B space, as businesses and individuals often need to share sensitive information, and cyber threats are constantly evolving. Failing to prioritize website security can leave a company vulnerable to attacks, which can have serious consequences.

Our security hardening task list included the following:

• Installing and configuring best-in-class security plugins
• Providing protection against malicious logins
• Providing protection against DDOS attacks
• Implementing HTTP security headers and permissions policy

Technical SEO Optimization: Keeping Rank

Technical search engine optimization (SEO) helps B2B businesses improve their visibility in search engine results, which can drive targeted traffic to their website. Attracting qualified traffic to your website can increase leads and sales, helping your business achieve its marketing goals and increase the bottom line: revenue.

Our SEO task list included the following:

• Minimizing the main thread to improve page load time
• Restructuring HTML/CSS for better performance and Google Snippets
• Improving mobile user experience
• Implementing automated SEO tag management
• Fixing all 404 errors
• Updating and implementing a new redirect strategy

Veritone Website

The Net Result, A Resounding Success

Through these efforts, Clear Digital significantly improved the performance and scalability of Veritone’s website. Scott Leatherman, Veritone CMO, said, “Overall, the partnership between Clear Digital and Veritone was a resounding success. By leveraging their expertise in web performance and B2B best practices, Clear Digital was able to deliver tangible results and help Veritone improve our digital brand experience and marketing KPIs.”

The optimization of the Vertione.com website produced improved engagement metrics (26% increase in pages per session), boosted page speed and load times (154% increase in Google PageSpeed Insights score), increased organic SEO (84% increase in organic traffic and 20% increase in average keyword position), increased the number of sales and marketing qualified leads, eliminated downtime, and sped up release cycles.

Overall, the partnership between Clear Digital and Veritone was a resounding success. Clear Digital was able to deliver tangible results and help Veritone improve our digital brand experience and marketing KPIs.

These benefits aren’t just measurable data; they’re also apparent to Veritone’s users, where it matters most. Finding the right strategy to improve website performance and executing that strategy is crucial to brand experience, marketing goals, and bottom-line success.