How We Rebuilt The World’s #1 Natural Health Website

Published

Ancient Nutrition is a high-traffic natural health and fitness website that also manufactures and sells its own health supplements. Prior to working with Materiell to relaunch the Ancient Nutrition website, Ancient Nutrition ranked as the second most popular natural health website on the Internet.

Ancient Nutrition Needed A Website Relaunch To Match Its Brand

After working with Moxie Sozo, a design agency, to relaunch the Ancient Nutrition brand, Ancient Nutrition felt there was a mismatch between the new Ancient Nutrition branding and their website.
Axe Wellness came to Materiell looking to update and relaunch the Ancient Nutrition content site to reflect the new branding and optimize performance and usability.
Given the success of their brand redesign with Moxie Sozo, Ancient Nutrition wished to maintain that design relationship while working with Materiell for help with implementation, development, user experience, and performance optimization.

How We Helped Ancient Nutrition Redesign Its Website

Redesigning and optimizing Ancient Nutrition’s website required a mix of front-end and back-end changes.

A Completely Rebuilt Information Architecture

With so many different content types and categories, optimizing Ancient Nutrition’s information architecture required a detailed approach:

“They…rebuilt the information architecture, and the sitemap is completely different than it was now.” Kate Johnson, Senior Director, Digital Marketing & eCommerce, Ancient Nutrition

To offer improved usability and performance, and facilitate the implementation of new functionality, we rebuilt the existing information architecture for Ancient Nutrition’s content.

A More Optimized Hosting Environment

As part of updating Ancient Nutrition’s website, we moved the site to Pantheon hosting, which offered a massive improvement in stability.
In order to provide a seamless migration while accounting for the continuous volume of content that the Ancient Nutrition team produces, we performed a live database pull to ensure that all content was up-to-date after the migration process.

A New A-Z Conditions Index For Easy Browsing

Ancient Nutrition publishes remedies and content for a huge variety of medical conditions, which means it’s essential that visitors can sort between different conditions to find the content that matters most to them.
To improve the site’s usability, we implemented an A-Z conditions index that lets visitors quickly jump to content that covers a specific condition:
Dr.Axe A-Z Conditions Directory

New Filters For The Food Archive

In the food category, Ancient Nutrition shares research and uses for various natural foods. On the old site, there wasn’t an option for visitors to filter out specific types of foods. To improve this section’s usability, we added a new food category filter so that visitors can filter specific types of foods:
Dr.Axe Food Directory

Multiple Recipe Filters To Account For Taste And Dietary Needs

Ancient Nutrition has a huge library of recipes across a range of diets and meal types, but the original Ancient Nutrition design only offered visitors limited options for filtering recipes. As part of the redesign, we added a new set of filtering options to help visitors choose by:

  • Meal type
  • Diet type
  • Ingredient

Many of Ancient Nutrition’s visitors have specific conditions and dietary restrictions. By adding these filters, Ancient Nutrition’s visitors can now quickly find the recipes that match their unique requirements:
Dr.Axe Healthy Recipes Directory

A Physical Store Locator For Ancient Nutrition’s Products

In addition to the Ancient Nutrition eCommerce store, many physical retailers also stock Ancient Nutrition products.
To help visitors find the physical retailer nearest to them, we added a store locator that lets visitors filter by geographic proximity and view location details for each individual store:
Dr.Axe Store Locator

Improved Back-end Management

Beyond front-end changes, the Ancient Nutrition team also wanted a more streamlined, performance-optimized dashboard to facilitate easier content creation for their team.
To help, we redesigned the native WordPress dashboard with an approach that fit Ancient Nutrition’s unique needs and workflows.

Results: Ancient Nutrition Is Now The #1 Natural Health Website

After launching the redesigned website, Ancient Nutrition is now the #1 natural health website in the world, with over 17 million monthly visitors since launching the new site:

“After the new site’s launch, we were ranked as the number one natural health site globally. Everyone’s thrilled with the performance, and we’re getting great engagement numbers.”Kate Johnson, Senior Director, Digital Marketing & eCommerce, Ancient Nutrition

We were also able to seamlessly cooperate with Ancient Nutrition’s existing design agency, Moxie Sozo, to implement the redesign:

“We were very impressed with their ability to shepherd so many different partners throughout the process. […] They were very responsive and very easy to work with.”Kate Johnson, Senior Director, Digital Marketing & eCommerce, Ancient Nutrition

An Ongoing Relationship Between Materiell And Ancient Nutrition

Because of the success of the website relaunch, Ancient Nutrition chose to continue its relationship with Materiell via our ongoing support and maintenance retainer plans.
We now maintain Ancient Nutrition’s website with WordPress core and plugin updates, as well as general website fixes.
Beyond those fixes, we also provide full application support for Ancient Nutrition’s site, including customized support for Ancient Nutrition’s unique client architecture and traffic needs.
This ensures that as Ancient Nutrition continues to grow, we’ll be there to make sure their site keeps performing at a high level.
And if Ancient Nutrition needs any additional support, they’re able to easily reach out for help directly from our team of experts.
Visit Dr.Axe | Ancient Nutrition
How can we help with your project?