Projects done while working for seoplus+

As a web developer at seoplus+, I have worked on more than 200 websites. While the majority of the project was on WordPress, seoplus also has clients on platforms like Shopify, CraftCMS, Drupal, Grav, and even custom CMS solutions. In order to stay respectful to seoplus+ and not create any conflicts of interest, I won’t be directly disclosing the names of the clients.

About the company

seoplus+ is an award-winning digital marketing agency with a strong focus on SEO (as you can probably imagine from their name). They hold a special place in my heart because I have never seen so much bonding happening in the workplace. Whether you are a client or their employee, you will be surrounded by friends.

Projects for a phone repair chain

During my time in seoplus I had an opportunity to work on several projects for a Canadian phone repair company. I’ve worked on maintaining their WordPress website, adding new features, and working on the performance of the site. Below are a few projects that are worth mentioning.

Sell your phone price calculator

The company needed a multi-step tool that gives users an instant quote on the device they want to sell.

The user selects their device model, brand, and specs. The user then answers a few questions that help determine the condition level. After that, the tool connects to a third-party API of the phone prices and returns the correct one based on the API. From a technical standpoint, the tool was mainly written in PHP - it is a custom page template that decides which content to show based on the URL query parameters. There were 2 versions created for the A/B test - one that gives the quote instantly and one that sends it over email (a Contact Form 7 plugin extension was created to pass in custom shortcodes in the email body).

Onsite repair booking integration

The company needed a tool that will allow its users to book an on-site repair session with one of their technicians. Here is how it works:

• The user enters their address or a postal code
• The system assigns a technician that covers that area
• A booking window for that technician is shown to choose the date and time.

Most of the functionality was handled in JavaScript using the jQuery library. The address field is using the Google Maps autocompletion API. The booking component has custom integration with a third-party booking system.

Projects for a rental company

Below are a few projects worth noting that were made for an Ottawa-based rental company.

Automating the content throughout the site

The company has a list of rental properties that are shown on its WordPress website. The information on these listings changes every month, so it needs to be updated throughout the site. Originally, the website and the list of properties were a lot smaller, so their theme was not automating a lot of the things that should be automated: pricing was often a text field and had multiple different formats, which meant you have to update everything manually every time something changes.

To solve this, I proposed a project that will allow the pricing for all of the properties to be controlled in one place. An options page was created that allowed you to create a relationship between a property page and a price. To allow usage of the price in the WYSIWYG editors, a few custom shortcodes were made, one of them was a shortcode that shows the “Starting from” price based on the cheapest option of the selected property type (1-2-3 bedroom apartments, townhomes, houses).

This project drastically reduced the number of hours needed to update the website.

Custom search and filtering

The company needed a new listing page that would show all of its available properties. The page had to have a filtering system that lets you choose the price ranges, amenities, property types, and features. This functionality was mainly created with jQuery and the properties were pulled from the WP Rest API.

Custom WordPress themes

While working at seoplus+ I’ve made a lot of custom themes for WordPress. To avoid any conflict of interests, I will not share the company names, but here are some of the project types that I’ve done:

• Traveling museum exhibit website: a custom theme with an integration with Google Maps to show their current exhibits throughout the world. Built with Bootstrap 4 and jQuery
• Testing facility for self-driving cars: a custom WP theme built with the Understrap framework
• A new website for a pest control company made with the Understrap framework
• …and many more

Improving existing sites

Website performance

Working on a client site’s performance was a common task at seoplus+ since a lot of clients already have a site and need help promoting it. Because of this, I’ve done a lot of work optimizing websites. Some of the common improvements include:

• decreasing the server response time
• implementing caching
• reducing the number of resources loaded on the page
• lazy loading elements or breaking down into subpages
• decreasing the cumulative layout shift
• removing render-blocking resources
• connecting the website to a CDN
• …and more

Website migrations

Another common task in seoplus. I’ve done many website migrations during my time there, some of which included writing custom scripts to automatically migrate/create post types based on the data available.

Technical SEO support

Seoplus specializes in SEO, so every website we worked on was made with best SEO practices in mind. There was also a lot of work-related to SEO on existing sites. Here are some of the tasks I’ve done:

• Speed optimizations (as mentioned above)
• Adding schema markup
• Creating redirects
• Fixing redirect chains
• Find & replace text actions via the database
• …and more