Plum Guide

Plum Guide is a curated marketplace, handpicking the world's best holiday rentals, homes and short-term lets. It applies a meticulous vetting process to both the property and the host.

In 2020, Plum Guide went through a redesign as they wanted to improve the way they worked with technology. We supported them by integrating our software engineers in their in-house design and development team.

Plum Guide’s new design is about showcasing their meticulously selected properties with very high quality photos and assets. However, this can impact the load time of a web page and mean the user experience can be frustrating. Not exactly what you need when you’re booking a holiday.

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We wanted full collaboration with the client at every stage, so they were never in the dark and were involved in all the decisions. We identified the problems and drew on our knowledge of relevant technology, while searching our bank of proven techniques to find a solid solution.

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We put our heads together to first create an initial version of the new design, based on work from Plum Guide’s design team. We then looked at the website performance, and improved the loading times to give the user high quality assets with no lag. We did this by working on the image compression and dimensions, enabling lazy-loading, using caching and doing it all under a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

As we launched, we A/B tested different variations of the design and kept revisiting and implementing design changes until Plum Guide were happy.