The Client
Ring of Honor (ROH) Wrestling is a professional wrestling television series that offers best-in-ring action known for its athleticism and hard-hitting style. Incorporating wrestling, mixed martial arts, and high-flying, ROH provides its dedicated fan base with an exciting show full of athleticism, intensity, and passion.
The Situation
To better serve its fan base, Ring of Honor wanted to implement an integrated omnichannel experience across the web, mobile apps, and TV apps, creating an intuitive UI experience and enhancing user engagement in the process. Overall site performance needed to be improved, as did site security. Additionally, the Ring of Honor team wanted to increase the number of paid user subscriptions and wanted to bring in live feeds from social media.
The Challenge
ROH tapped digital transformation firm Ameex to help them analyze potential solutions based on three main factors: technical feasibility, extendibility, and ease of content management. Specifically, Ameex needed to consider third-party video streaming and social media live feeds—both of these were going to be imperative to the site’s continued success, but both needed to be as light as possible, minimizing any load on the server without sacrificing features or content. Page load times had to be kept small, even when the wow factor was ramped up high.
The Solution
Ameex seamlessly integrated Drupal CMS and Commerce, adding Solr search to help expedite the search process and reduce the load from Drupal database. They also implemented the stable version of Ooyala to allow for error-free video streaming. Acquia’s inherent extendability allowed Ameex to take a mobile-first approach, making it easy for the ROH site to extend to mobile apps like Apple, Android, and even Roku. The team built three different layouts to provide a stellar omnichannel user experience.
The Results
The Ring of Honor site performance metrics improved across the board. Not only did their subscription base triple in a mere six months after the launch, but user engagement also improved, with average session duration increasing by 25 percent and more than 10,000 app downloads across mobile platforms. Additionally, site performance also improved; the site is now fully PCI compliant, and while the new homepage featured much more content than the previous version, it takes less than half the time to load.