Liberty Flights

A new SEO-friendly design and a mobile version released

Initially the client wanted to redesign the banners on the website, but having analyzed the website design in detail, we came to a conclusion that a complete renewal is the way to go. Valor suggested a new color scheme, new fonts, product cards, and users' profiles, and then adopted banners to the new style.

While redesigning the platform, we also analyzed user data from Google Analytics and noticed that most of Liberty Flights’ clients visit the website using mobile devices. So we developed a mobile version of the platform.

Migrated the site from ASP.NET to Angular & Nest.js

To simplify the future work with the website and reduce development time, maintenance effort, and bugs, we moved Liberty Flights to Nest.js. The framework has a diverse ecosystem with plenty of well-supported packages and test frameworks the project can benefit from. Even though we had huge reasons for this migration, it also became one of the biggest challenges for the Valor team.

The Challenge

We dealt with a codebase written differently from the Valor's standards, which made the migration more complicated. Another obstacle we faced was that the frontend part aimed to work inside the browser, which is typical for Angular. This influenced the work accuracy and negatively affected SEO. Since the web page content varied based on the results of work in the browser instead of coming directly from the server, we couldn’t display the requested info in the search results. Due to updates in Angular 10, a whole lot of issues arose during the deployment process. But the worst part was the necessity to turn off the production site during the deployment for maintenance. Sometimes it led to nearly an hour of downtime, which was unacceptable.

Solution:

Adding Angular Universal for server-side rendering (SSR) helped us solve the SEO challenge as the pages started loading fully and displayed correct search engine results. Later, once it became available, we switched to Scully instead of SSR. Scully allowed us to completely rework the build and deployment processes and eliminated the need to use the maintenance page before deploying to the app (especially when it comes to the deployment of features on the frontend).

SEO optimization

bTo improve the visibility and searchability of Liberty Flights, we’ve optimized the on-site content and created crowd marketing campaigns to increase the conversion rates. In a nutshell, the following activities helped users to find out about LF and start using the service:

Switched from Load Balancer to GCP

Since the website traffic depends on numerous factors like the day of the week, time, etc., the traffic rates aren’t stable, and peak loads wave-likely vary. We had to ensure the LF platform could perform stably during the peak loads while remaining cost-effective for our client.

Having analyzed user and peak loads, we moved servers to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which helps Liberty Flights balance the number of nodes used depending on the number of users. When they have users’ growth, extra nodes roll out on GCP automatically.

Delivered numerous features to improve usability

Valor Software has added some new functionality that improved the user experience with the platform and simplified the purchase flow.