Grant Thornton improves multi-lingual, multi-market site performance

An ambition that required a meaningful digital intervention

Grant Thornton is one of the world's largest professional services networks of independent accounting and consulting member firms. The organization provides assurance, tax and advisory services to privately held businesses, public interest entities, and public sector entities.

Grant Thornton needed to improve the performance of its multi-lingual, multi-market Optimizely site, add new features and improve search functionality. The site needed to be accessible at high speeds from any of Grant Thornton's important markets around the globe, but its site speed score of about 40-50 didn't meet that requirement. In addition, the client required support for new languages and wanted to integrate a new section for gated content.

Optimizely was used to dramatically improve the website’s performance. Optimizely partner, Niteco integrated Google’s Natural Language machine learning engine so that Grant Thornton’s entities around the world could use natural language processing for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This engine enables features like sentiment analysis, entity analysis, entity sentiment analysis, content classification and syntax analysis.

Optimizely outfitted the website with a separate section for gated content. As the company works with a myriad of clients globally, having relevant documents and files readily available from anywhere is imperative. To top it off, Niteco fimplemented Content Security Policy to enhance the site’s security and help to reduce Cross-site scripting (XSS) risks.

Unhappy with the search functionality on its site, Grant Thornton also asked Optimizely to give its integration a boost. Optimizely did so by adding Find Auto-Boosting, which allows for the prioritisation of certain search results according to age and/or popularity. Optimizely also integrated Find Best Bets, which allows search administrators to promote selected content, which will then appear on top of other search results.

Finally Optimizely built an entirely new Lucence index that works together with the EPI Find index. This guarantees that the site’s availability always stays above 99%.

Grant Thornton International now enjoys a website that has an improved site speed score of over 80, up from 40-50.

The improved search functionality makes for a more efficient user experience for Grant Thornton’s many clients who can now also easily and securely access gated content. Other features include a new location/office page, a new case study/campaign page, a Marketo marketing automation connector, email obfuscation, several new block types as well as media access rights for each member firm.