Malibu Boats Website Rebuild

The Challenge

Malibu Boats, the world’s best wake surfing, wakeboarding & water skiing towboats needed a site that could provide users with a quality user experience at a fast speed. Its retail site, www.malibuboats.com was designed using a modified version of ModX. Since its launch in 2017, the site had been suffering from long loading times. Additionally, malibuboats.com’s complex coding reduced its visibility to search engines like Google. Though Malibu has onsite programmers, they needed a development partner to provide additional assistance. Overall, fjorge’s main challenge was to decrease loading times while keeping the site’s informative design.

fjorge’s additional technical challenges were the lack of ModX documentation, and the inability to work with libraries. In conjunction, having to do things manually as opposed to using plugins was difficult.  Malibu’s old site was in Knockout but they wanted a site with no Javascript. fjorge also dealt with a ModX plugin that was a layout builder so could not alter the site’s content.

The Solution

To decrease load times, fjorge minimized the number of libraries used within the site. fjorge was also able to meet the following criteria for mobile and desktop in a Lighthouse Audit with simulated 4G speeds:

Desktop

i. Performance – 85% or greater

ii. Best Practices – 95% or greater

iii. Accessibility – 95% or greater

iv. SEO – 90% or greater

Mobile

i. Performance – 80% or greater

ii. Best Practices – 90% or greater

iii. Accessibility – 90% or greater

iv. SEO – 90% or greater

In the end, our team was able to decrease site load time to 2 seconds or less on instances of a t2.medium site with an m4.medium AWS Server. Additionally, fjorge was able to allow for content to be managed by Malibu’s marketing team daily, as well as improve the user experience with help from their team.