Frontity is a free and open source framework for building headless WordPress sites using React. Learn more at docs.frontity.org.

For those of you who know us, you know that before launching the open source framework, we worked for a few years hand-to-hand with WordPress publishers and blog owners to help improve the performance of their websites on mobile devices.

We developed a mobile WordPress theme specifically for their needs called Frontity PRO. It was built using React on the front-end and the REST API to fetch the content, along with our PWA WordPress plugin.

At the beginning of 2019 (shortly before we announced our decision of placing all our focus on frontity.org), Gudog’s team approached us with the goal of improving their blog’s experience on mobile devices.

Moving to Frontity PRO took all of their concerns off the table, and resulted in better visitor metrics and SEO results.

One year later, we met with Javier Cuevas, Co-founder and CTO of Gudog, to know more about how Frontity has helped them so far.

Context

Gudog is a marketplace platform that connects dog owners with local dog sitters in Europe. Founded by Loly Garrido and Javier Cuevas, the company was born in 2012 with the idea of ​​creating the first alternative to dog kennels.

Today, they are the market leader of these pet services in Spain and have more than half million registered users. In addition, Gudog operates in four more countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Ireland.

They have a website and a mobile app to provide their services. Apart from that, Gudog's blog is one of the most important sources of traffic acquisition. It is used as the main marketing channel for distributing regular content and attracting new users.

Prior to Frontity, Gudog was using a responsive WordPress theme for their blog. When they started the project in 2012, around 20% of their traffic was mobile.

This percentage started to grow annually since then and by 2019, mobile devicesgenerated80% of their blog’s traffic.

Challenge

The last few years, Gudog’s blog had a lot of visitors who had switched over to mobile, reading its content in a non 100% mobile-dedicated site which was already a bit outdated.

Javier's goal was to upgrade their blog's mobile experience so it didn’t lag behind and lose traffic.

“Performance had become an important ranking factor (among others) for Google’s mobile searches and our blog wasn’t up to date with the best practices. We had the feeling that it didn't meet the user expectations and wanted to improve that.”

Javier Cuevas, CTO at Gudog.

In addition, the company had four blogs (one for each language) with four different WordPress installations that shared the same server. This often made them grappling with load times challenges too.

Javier explored other responsive WordPress themes but none of them seemed to fit their needs. They had no impact on speed, and didn’t help deliver a seamless experience on mobile.

Solution

Gudog’s team wanted to find an alternative to provide their mobile visitors with a fast, modern experience. Something reliable which also allowed their content's team to maintain WordPress for creating and editing content with ease.

As soon as Javier knew about our theme, it seemed clear to both teams that it was a great solution for their blog. He liked the idea of providing their readers with a mobile-dedicated site.

There were actually a couple of reasons behind his choice:

• Using a WordPress theme built with React allowed them to gain important benefits in terms of performance / load times on the one side, and continue using WordPress for managing the content on the other.
• The user-friendliness (usability) of a solution specifically designed for a mobile audience.
• No need to build a custom theme from scratch, saving resources and time.

You can check out Frontity's theme visiting blog.gudog.com on your mobile browser.

Results

Today’s users value speed and simplicity above all. With Frontity, Gudog was able to deliver a frictionless user experience on mobile while improving their blog’s loading times.

The results have been very positive. Since installing our theme in February of 2019, blog.gudog.com has not only increased traffic and user engagement, but it’s also easier to discover in Google’s search results.

Compared to the previous year without Frontity (2018), Gudog’s blog has seen:

• 66% increase in user acquisition.
• 149% increase in page views.
• 78% increase of the time spent on site: from 36 seconds to 1 minute 04 seconds.
• Lower bounce rate: from an average 91% to 74%.
• Almost instant load times on mobile.

And these are not the only statistics Frontity helped them achieve.

From 2019 to January 2020, Gudog increased their organic blog traffic by 88,91%, and significantly improved their SEO results.

Along with their content strategy, Frontity’s performance helped their blog rank for the first position in Google’s search results with the keywords in Spanish “blog de perros” (Dogs’ blog), as well as contributed to appear in Google Discover.

You can see below how the query “blog de perros” goes improving its Google search ranking for Gudog's blog during the last 16 months:

Gudog has managed to keep both Google and their blog’s visitors happy, and their concerns about mobile UX and performance are now a thing of the past.

“Since going live with Frontity’s mobile theme, the results have come fast and beyond our expectations. We have seen an increase in user acquisition and it helped us improve our SEO a lot. And it just took us 3 minutes to install it.

In the near future, we’d like to take one step further and develop our own custom theme with the Frontity framework.

Javier Cuevas, Gudog CTO.

In many ways, this theme has allowed both Gudog and Frontity to establish a close collaboration. We’ll be happy to help drive the evolution of their blog for years to come!