Need to Know
- Purolator's new fully integrated responsive design offers immediate access to users' most desired tasks.
- Northern completed Purolator's new digital experience in six months.
- Winner of the 2021 Web Excellence Award for Professional Services.
Client
Purolator picks up and delivers over one-quarter of a billion packages annually, and its website sees over nine million page views per month. Its new digital experience gives customers immediate visibility to delivery options and times—minimizing most user visits to minutes.
Brief
Purolator is among Canada's leading courier, freight, and logistics companies. With enhanced navigation, its new website offers fast access to users' immediate needs:
- Tracking and tracing a missed delivery
- Finding a pick-up point
- Sending a package
Challenge
For Purolator, enhancing its digital experience meant upgrading site performance and security while giving customers more visibility and access to delivery options. Purolator's service infrastructure relies extensively on web-based interactions. Therefore, the API integrations that comprise a significant component of its ecosystem must be resilient to outages and downtime that can dramatically impact customer experiences and sales.
Strategy
Purolator partnered with Northern to ensure its new public-facing site is mobile-friendly, scalable, accessible, responsive, and search-friendly. Northern recommended a Drupal 8 open-source content management system (CMS) backed by Acquia Edge CDN (Content Delivery Network) and WAF (Web Application Firewall). Northern validated the new site design and architecture through user acceptance testing, then converted the design elements into reusable components to ease rapid deployment while keeping the site on-brand.
Customized Drupal Webforms enhance accessibility compliance, usability, and bilingual compatibility - improving the user experience while safeguarding future legal requirements.
After years of optimizing its SEO, it was essential to preserve Purolator's domain authority while re-platforming. Northern's SEO experts ensured successful migration, adding a new Controlled Vocabulary mechanism to help maintain SEO best practices by removing human error when entering common data reused across the site. Using the SOLR Search API while integrating an online Resource Centre increased the volume of information crawled, indexed, and available for search.