Case Study: Devils Workshop switched to rtPanel

rtPanel is a flagship product of rtCamp launched as open-source for WordPress enthusiast. rtPanel is a WordPress Theme Framework and forms a standard base for theme developers to create awesome themes. rtPanel team also offer free technical support to developers.

Why did we move?

rtPanel has been growing rapidly (already crossed 5000+ downloads mark). The optimized mark-up of rtPanel framework, improves the site speed and SEO capability. DevilsWorkshop being a part of rtCamp, we decided to use it as a case study to show rtPanel’s capability.  It was a perfect example to consider, as it has a huge reader base, vast content, multiple authors and different functional elements.

We also used this opportunity to rebrand the website with even better looks and refreshing design. Read this to know more about re-design.

Devilsworkshop was earlier running over rtBase framework (internally used in rtCamp). It was later evolved over 2 years of experiential learning with more than 1000+ WordPress projects. The ultimate goal of bringing it to public, was later achieved with launch of rtPanel.

A Good Friday:

On a fine morning of a Friday (February 5, 2012), we just decided to switch Devils’ Workshop on rtPanel. The development was done on live site and within 3 working days it was implemented.

 

The results are beyond our expectations and it concluded that rtPanel framework can truly do wonders. The increase in traffic was due the optimized markup and default integration of Yoast SEO plugin. The increased traffic ultimately lead to increase in Google Adsense revenue by whooping 85%.

Reference Screenshots:

1. Page Load Time

Page Load time for Devils Workshop

2.  Visitors Traffic

*Bounce rate is increased, as during design phase, the navigation to archive posts was not given. Now its been corrected, and we hopefully will see the better bounce rate in next months stats.

3. Adsense Revenue

AdSense Stats  - DevilsWorkshop

Do drop in your comments.

Related: Devils’ Workshop gets a New Logo and New Design

10 Comments

Sagar March 22, 2012

Awesome! The increase in revenue and traffic is huge and mind blowing, congo and goodluck. 🙂

P.S. – The brownish background used initially in the theme looked better than the white background used now.

Hector March 22, 2012

Can you please point out as to how much did it cost you to get this theme redesigned by them? Also, apart from the yoast seo plugin, page speed improvement, how was the blog changed from SEO point of view?

Gajanan March 22, 2012

Hello Hector.
The new theme is designed by our parent company, hence theme design cost was never a concern :). If you would like to know about the cost structure, you may Contact Us.
Since DevilsWorkshop is now moved on rtPanel, the performance was auto improved due to SEO friendly mark-up of rtPanel theme framework. The quality of codes are standard hence the speed/performance is also optimized.

Thanks.

Hector March 25, 2012

I use thesis right now. Keeping an eye as to how this platform develops. 🙂

Dnyanesh Mankar March 22, 2012

Good work on the back-end!

DW needs a good design and a logo. Seriously.

Raquel Johnson March 24, 2012

Nice Template could we use this template ?

Gajanan March 29, 2012

Hello Raquel.

We are glad that you liked this template.

Its a custom template developed based on readers of our blog. If you are interested to get a custom theme developed, please contact us here.

Cheers!

Jai March 30, 2012

I can agree with the Page load time, but how does that reflect to the web traffic.. is it simple like faster loading pages is better in view of SEO or do u have any other reason which leads to this increase..?

Gajanan March 30, 2012

Higher the page load time, higher is the bounce rate which ultimately affect the page views and average time spent on website. Another reason for increase in traffic is better mark-up of rtPanel Framework which is more SEO friendly. I am not sure if page load time directly co-relates to SEO.

Rahul Bansal April 1, 2012

Almost 2 years back, Google made it clear that site speed will matter – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

Speed is one of factor that increase traffic from Google.

Apart from rtPanel, we are using extremely lightweight rtSocial plugin for facebook and twitter share buttons – http://rtpanel.com/blog/releasing-rtsocial-plugin/