News aggregation platform: Improving engagement by 21% with redesign and plugin fixes

Project overview
Every day, news outlets publish dozens or even hundreds of stories each. With this onslaught of information, separating what matters from what doesn’t is no cakewalk — and neither is staying informed without getting overwhelmed.
Our US-based client understood this problem like no one else. To help users easily stay on top of trending headlines, the startup came up with News Up First: a website that would aggregate stories from news outlets and display their summaries generated with OpenAI’s LLM model.
The first iteration of the platform proved there was demand for a news portal like News Up First. However, as positive as early user feedback was, it also revealed multiple sources of friction in the UI/UX design, such as slow page loading. On top of that, the plugin that enabled AI-powered summaries started acting up and needed some debugging.
That’s where News Up First turned to us to redesign its WordPress website and debug its OpenAI RSS integration.
Services


Challenges
Our client’s main concern was aligning the new design with user feedback. So, we studied it closely to identify the key sources of frustration and address them in our redesign. At the same time, we followed the tenets of human-centered design to make the new interface intuitive to navigate and use.
The existing platform also showed subpar performance in page loading speed, bringing down the overall user experience. So, in addition to redesigning the website and turning mockups into a fully functional WordPress website, we had to review the website’s components to improve its performance and boost technical SEO and UX.
Finally, the plugin that enables the RSS feed functionality and OpenAI integration, Feedzy, started returning errors when generating summaries. So, we had to work closely with the plugin team to debug the integration and ensure its smooth performance.
Strategic business needs
01 Redesign the website to improve the user experience
02 Remove issues with the summary generation plugin
03 Ensure the updated website is responsive and fast
04 Increase the CSAT score by at least 10% following the redesign
05 Improve the net promoter score by at least 5%
06 Increase user engagement by at least 10%
Technical requirements
01 Create a new responsive, human-centered UI/UX design for the news portal
02 Debug the integration with Feedzy, an RSS feed plugin with OpenAI integration
03 Achieve a task success rate of at least 85% across the redesigned website
04 Bring down the Largest Contentful Paint under 2 seconds
05 Minimize the response time across the platform
06 Increase the throughput by at least 10% with performance improvements
07 Decrease application error rates by at least 10%
We’ll identify the main sources of friction and frustration and address them with granular UX improvements or a full-fledged redesign.


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Solutions
We kicked off our collaboration with a thorough review of the available user feedback and website performance. Based on the identified areas of improvement and our client’s other requirements, we outlined the roadmap and agreed on the timeline and deliverables.
We began by redesigning the website’s UI/UX and thoroughly testing the user flows to ensure high task success rates and system usability scale scores across the website. After implementing the redesign, we tested its page loading speed and improved it, bringing the Largest Contentful Paint to under 1.8 seconds and improving throughput by 12% as a result.
To resolve issues with the RSS Feed plugin, we worked closely with its team to identify the root cause of those issues and eliminate them.
As a result, our client received a fully implemented website redesign, along with performance improvements and a debugged plugin integration. Application error rates were reduced by 16%, while user satisfaction increased by 17%.



Full UI/UX redesign
According to the existing users’ feedback, we reviewed the navigation scheme and tweaked it to make it smoother and more intuitive. Our redesign also involved improving link visibility on the summary cards and improving the color palette for the website’s dark mode.
As a result of our redesign, the browsing experience became smoother, more intuitive, and more pleasant. Our redesign secured a 91% task success rate and a 90 usability score, all while increasing user satisfaction by 17% and engagement by 21%.

Responsive WordPress interface
With the UI/UX redesign approved by our client, we translated the mockups into a fully functioning WordPress website. We paid extra attention to the responsiveness of the interface on mobile devices to make the website easy to use on the go.
Thanks to our thorough testing and multiple rounds of improvements, the website comes with an intuitive and smooth UI/UX for mobile devices. We also verified that the website’s mobile version showed a consistently high performance even on devices with limited computing resources or an intermittent internet connection.

Feedzy plugin debugging
The website used the Feedzy plugin for its RSS feed functionality and OpenAI integration. The latter enabled the website to present concise summaries of the displayed news stories. While it was functioning as intended at the beginning, certain issues with the plugin made themselves known as time passed.
To solve them and improve the website’s overall performance, we collaborated with the plugin’s team. Thanks to our attention to detail, performance, and long-term scalability, we not only resolved plugin issues but also ensured it worked fast and smoothly under various request rates.

Page speed optimizations
Finally, we reviewed the website’s frontend and backend and made both components leaner to improve their performance. Our revisions also involved reviewing and optimizing WordPress integrations for better loading speed and response time.
As a result, the website’s Largest Contentful Paint went down to <1.8 s, while its throughput increased by 12% in our testing. Our optimizations also helped bring down application error rates by 16%. All of this helped the website improve technical SEO performance and user experience.
Tech stack
Impact
Thanks to our redesign and performance improvements, our client saw several positive outcomes for the website, including:
We’ll review its codebase and key integrations to identify the root causes of errors and performance issues and eliminate them.


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