How we worked with The Derby Inn to launch their new website.
Relucent worked with The Derby Inn to build their website with a cleaner, sleeker, design that works faster, especially on mobile devices.
When The Derby Inn came to us in November 2021 they wanted a modern website with a more exciting feel than the website they already had, without the heavy financial burden of running it - and we were happy to oblige.
The Derby Inn wanted their website to better highlight their current events and offers and to better display the options available in their menu. They also wanted a better flow through their website to their phone number and OpenTable for bookings.
One of their main issues with the website they already had is the cost and the pure amount of maintenance that it took to keep the website up to date and accurate. We managed to reduce their website hosting costs by 70%, whilst increasing their website's performance and maintainability dramatically using incremental static regeneration with NextJS. In addition, we also managed to improve performance using NextJS' lazy-loading image component and, inspired by react-chrono, we implemented a timeline to display upcoming events at the gastropub. In addition to optimising the content's performance, we also decided to use TailwindCSS to cut down on unused CSS in production and focus on the website's responsive display for mobile devices.
Performance
From our tests using PageSpeed Insights we found a 54% increase in performance and an improvement of 2.5s in First Contentful Paint. Even so, we're continuing to work on the website's performance and content to make sure that its the best it can be. In addition to the performance improvements, we have also greatly improved the Search Engine Optimisation of the entire website with the additional use of rich snippets and tailored pages in order to catch the eye of the key audience and demographics. With budget in mind, we chose Netlify as the hosting provider for its ease-of-use, Active DDoS mitigation, Encryption, and globally-distributed data centers.
Quality
In addition to performance improvements, we also implemented a number of tools in order to ensure that website deployment quality is maintained and everything always runs smoothly. We did so in a number of ways, including continuous integration with CSpell for spell checking, ESLint for code linting and style enforcement, and Cypress for browser testing.
