The European leading provider of fashion and interior design has a presence in five European countries: Germany; Switzerland; Austria; Netherlands; and France.
The Bottom Line
“Lumar’s Protect is a very reliable tool. We used Protect, for example, to check if anything is redirecting where it shouldn’t be. Before, I had to check everything manually but, with Lumar Protect, you can set up tests beforehand and really see what happens. It’s a great relief to know there is something that will notify me if anything has changed.”
— Senior SEO Manager
“Yet another tool added to an existing toolset is always something to consider carefully. But when our Senior SEO Manager told me about Lumar Protect I was convinced immediately. It is a huge time saver in spotting errors and can save you real money when site errors are not deployed because of it.”
— Head of Department Online Marketing
The Challenge
With multiple sites and traffic of over 1M impressions per month, the company’s biggest SEO concern is that important content goes missing, will be uncrawlable or they noindex pages by mistake.
The business has a small, but organized team of developers that run 2 week sprints using Jenkins for deployment and testing across the 5 sites. They compare their changes on test instances of the website with the current production version to ensure that no changes have been made to the main functionality of the website (cart, ordering process, menu etc.) that were not desired.
Following the development checks, the Senior SEO checks if anything is broken from a SEO perspective. This is a time consuming process that involves a great deal of manual checks.
The Solution
The company implemented Lumar Protect (formerly called Automation Hub) as a release control mechanism in order to avoid deploying code that could harm their sites. They integrated Protect with Jenkins and set up notifications via email.
The initial set up was configured to issue a warning only rather than stopping deployment and tests were being run to determine, for example, if a shop category had been renamed without the SEOs knowledge – doing so triggers a redirect.
The Results
The business has so far run over 1,000 tests across their eight test suites. 18% of these tests issued a warning and each build had at least one failed test! The current average across Lumar Protect users is 33%.
Fortunately, these can be easily identified, prioritized, and fixed before code goes live.
In the future, the business also hopes to use Protect during its site migration project.
