Overview
Eastcoast Research (ECR) is a full-service market research firm providing both qualitative and quantitative insights to help brands understand consumer behaviour. ECR conducts a wide range of studies, including focus groups, interviews, sensory testing, home-use testing (HUT), and usability testing.
Download Case StudyHowever, ECR’s online presence wasn’t keeping pace with its professional reputation. A sluggish, under-optimized website limited their visibility, discouraged engagement, and made it harder for potential clients to explore the full range of their services.
Challenges
Before optimization, ECR’s WordPress website suffered from slow loading speeds, high bounce rates, and low engagement metrics. Visitors, often time-sensitive professionals, were abandoning the site before exploring key content like service offerings and facility locations.
ECR’s team had previously tried to improve performance using other optimization plugins, such as WP Rocket, but the results were minimal. The tool offered limited control over advanced speed factors like caching, code deferral, and content delivery network (CDN) efficiency.
With the site serving as a key lead-generation touchpoint for new clients, these performance issues were technical but also hurting discoverability and brand perception. The challenge was clear: make the site faster, more reliable, and more engaging without disrupting existing analytics or design integrity.
Solution
To address these performance gaps, ECR’s web team implemented NitroPack, a leading WordPress site optimization platform. NitroPack offers a more advanced and automated approach to performance tuning, combining several layers of optimization into one system.
What NitroPack Does
NitroPack helps websites load faster and perform better by:
- Caching pages efficiently so that returning visitors see pages almost instantly.
- Compressing and optimizing images for different device sizes to reduce heavy load times.
- Minifying and deferring code (JavaScript and CSS) so only the most essential content loads first.
- Using a built-in global CDN to deliver files quickly from the nearest server.
- Improving Core Web Vitals, Google’s key performance signals that directly affect SEO and user experience.
ECR’s optimization process began in January 2025 and took a few weeks to complete. The development team ran iterative tests to ensure stability, measure progress, and maintain accuracy in site analytics throughout the process.
What changed
A January 2025 performance pass reduced upfront load and improved responsiveness across key templates. The goal was simple: show meaningful content sooner and keep pages feeling snappy, especially on mobile. This was achieved without a redesign or disruption to analytics and third‑party tools.
Documented results
After NitroPack implementation, the site demonstrated strong, measurable improvements across several engagement and visibility metrics, tracked through Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
Search visibility & demand (GSC):
- Since January 2, 2025, daily clicks and impressions have trended upward.
- January 2025 to July 2025 vs. the prior six months:
- Average monthly clicks +34%
- Average monthly impressions +122%
Bounce rate (GA4):
- The average bounce rate from Direct traffic sources dropped from 47.8% to 40.2% (~16% relative decrease)
- The average bounce rate from Organic traffic sources dropped from 32.6% to 31.0% (~5% relative decrease)
Session quality (GA4):
Average session duration
- The average Direct user session duration rose from 2:20 → 3:10 (+35.74%)
- The average Organic user session duration rose from 2:30 → 3:15 (+30.00%)
Engagement rate
- Direct Search engagement rate increased 58% → 60% (+3.45%)
- Organic Search engagement rate increased 68% → 75% (+10.29%)
| Metric | Before Optimization | After Optimization | Change |
| Search Visibility (Impressions) – how often the site appears in search results | — | — | +122% |
| Organic Clicks – number of times users clicked through from Google | — | — | +34% |
| Bounce Rate – percentage of visitors leaving after one page | 47.8% (Direct) / 32.6% (Organic) | 40.2% / 31.0% | −16% and −5% |
| Session Duration – average time visitors spent on the site | 2:20 (Direct) / 2:30 (Organic) | 3:10 / 3:15 | +35.7% and +30.0% |
| Engagement Rate – percentage of users who actively interacted with the site | 58% (Direct) / 68% (Organic) | 60% / 75% | +3.5% and +10.3% |
These results indicate that users not only found ECR’s site more frequently through search but also stayed longer and interacted more once they arrived.
What does this mean?
Faster, more stable pages reduce early exits and encourage product exploration. The combination of rising impressions, clicks, and stronger engagement indicates that ECR is gaining visibility, which is a win. What makes it a win-win is that this attention drives deeper browsing and higher‑quality sessions.
Google uses both the improved user engagement metrics and the improved site performance as a positive sign that the website provides more value to users. This helps increase your site’s SEO score and can help improve your search engine results page (SERP) positioning over time.
Industry research
Independent case studies report similar patterns when page speed improves:
- Renault Case Study
- Renault analyzed 10M visits and found that improving LCP toward ~1s correlated with up to a:
- 14‑point drop in bounce rate
- 3% lift in conversions
- This shows clear evidence that faster rendering improves user behaviour.
- Renault analyzed 10M visits and found that improving LCP toward ~1s correlated with up to a:
Key takeaways for decision‑makers
- Speed is a growth lever. Lower bounce and higher engagement mean more chances to convert without increasing ad spend.
- SEO and UX move together. The GSC gains (clicks and impressions) alongside GA4 improvements suggest performance work supports both discoverability and on‑site outcomes.
- Pragmatic, low‑risk path. A targeted optimization sprint can deliver measurable wins without a costly rebuild.
Conclusion
For East Coast Research, optimizing site speed was a much-needed upgrade. It also led to a strategic improvement in visibility, engagement, and brand experience. The transition from a lagging, high-bounce site to a fast, user-friendly platform strengthened the company’s digital credibility and improved the quality of user interactions.
Within months, ECR achieved a 122% increase in visibility and significantly longer browsing sessions, reinforcing the role of performance optimization in supporting both SEO and user experience (UX) objectives.
Fast Pages Convert Visitors Into Sales
Your website’s speed shapes how potential clients perceive your brand.
Request a site performance audit today to see how faster load times can strengthen engagement and search performance.
