WikiJob is the UK's largest graduate jobs website. Founded in 2007 on an untidy mixture of vBulletin and Mediawiki, it ported over to Drupal in 2008.
Since moving to Drupal, the site has grown exponentially. WikiJob now receives 250k monthly unique visitors and delivers over 1.5 million monthly page views. For the two founders (Chris (myself) & Ed), this has meant a quick rise as a business, from working in our bedrooms to offices in Central London. WikiJob is currently a team of five, and is likely to grow to be a team of ten by the end of 2010. In months April - Dec 2009, we billed £102,000 in advertising. This year, we hope to bill over £500,000.
Drupal has been a key ingredient to our success. The unique power of Drupal is that it allows one person to single-handedly accomplish the work of a team of web developers, with very little code. Anyone with the time can make an awesome web site.
What we looked at
When we started the website using vBulletin and Mediawiki, travelling between the forums and the wikis was like visiting two separate sites, and integrating them was practically impossible. We looked at Wordpress, Xaraya, Postnuke, Joomla!, and Drupal. It came down to Drupal vs. Joomla! Joomla!'s approach to adding functionality is to bridge other software, e.g. phpBB inside Joomla etc. Drupal's approach was to start with the tidy central concept and build everything around that. Using just a few basic elements such as nodes, comments and taxonomies, it would be easy to build just about anything we'd need, so the decision was made. Drupal was it.
How WikiJob Was Built- Enter Drupal, April 2008
I used the vBulletin to Drupal module to port our userbase and forum content over. Using the Advanced Forum module, I managed to makeover our forums into something quite inviting. Using a mixture of the Book module, the Wikitools module, Wiki Text parser and Diff, I managed to recreate the wiki functionality of the original Mediawiki site, and ported over all the pages. I modified contib theme Bluebreeze which gave us a strong look and feel, and employed about four hundred 301 redirects to keep our SERP positions intact (which succeeded without incident).
The whole process took about a month working part time. I was astonished at how quickly the transition came about, and how painlessly. Once we had the new site up, signups shot through the roof and things were looking up.
Building Traffic
Building traffic to a website is part science and part art, but always a lot of work. We worked very hard on our SEO to get decent backlinks. Drupal helped tremendously by providing almost all of the onsite SEO automatically. Using clean URLs and Pathauto, it was possible for every address to have a nice path. Furthermore, I used the xmlsitemap module to ping Google with a new sitemap every time a new node was added. This means we get pages indexed in Google within minutes (e.g. WikiJob.co.uk - 12 minutes ago). People are always surprised at how quickly pages from our site appear in search results.
The subscriptions functionality has also been vital. Every time somebody posts on a thread on WikiJob, we automatically subscribe them, so when somebody else replies, they receive an email. We found that if for some reason emails didn't get sent out, traffic began to fall. That way we're certain it's a key component.
In 2009, our traffic was such that our server was crumbling. We decided to move to a dedicated VPS hosted by Netconnex. They provided an exceptional service in terms of network connectivity and bandwidth. We used the Boost module which massively reduced our CPU load and memory consumption, and meant that page load times feel through the floor. We found as our page load time improvement, Google directed us even more traffic.
It was our target to reach 100,000 unique monthly visitors. By mid 2009 we were there.
WikiJob- How We Turned a Website Into a Business
With traffic comes attention, and others begin to notice you. Although we'd got a busy website, we weren't making any money. We added Adsense to the site but it didn't bring in anywhere near enough. We decided to start selling ads directly. We systematically called companies who we thought would make good advertisers and seeing what we could do for them. It turned out to be both very difficult and very profitable. We never had an ounce of investment or debt in our business, so we needed to make money to eat.
Using the Ad module, we were able to track advertising and give advertisers reports on their successes.
So far, we still hadn't used any custom modules, themes or substantial PHP code that we'd written of any sort.
Autotagging Content- A New Navigation System
We had a lot of content spread across a number of different content types. I decided the best way of bringing it all together was to use a (bugfixed) MO Auto Add Terms module. People discuss companies and jobs on our site, so we gave each company their own taxonomy term. This module searches the node title and looks for occurrences of the term or its synonyms. If it finds it, it tags it. Then, using Views, we display other posts tagged with the same term as the node being viewed. In simple terms, when viewing a page, the columns around the content all show links to other posts and pages related to that company.
By applying this simple contextual navigation, pages per visit rose 20%.
Connecting with Mailchimp
We regularly email our userbase of over 30,000 people. We decided to use Mailchimp, not because Drupal's own system wasn't adequate, but because no system can better the infrastructure Mailchimp have organised. We hacked a version of the Mailchimp module to work with our registration form and all the data is synced on cron. Easy!
WikiJob & AdaptiveTheme
Adaptivethemes helped us redesign our site. The new theme went live in January and it looks amazing. We decided to go against the Web 2.0 look and have a really classic look and feel. It came out brilliantly. It was great working with them. They did a great job with the Advanced Forum theme too. The theme has had a very positive effect on advertisers and users alike, and has undoubtedly paid for itself already.
Optimisation for Traffic, and beating Google Pagespeed Checker
We hit another sticking point. Our VPS was powerful, but it wasn't enough to support our rising traffic. Pages were taking 10-15 seconds to load. It felt like being back in the dial-up days. We decided to move to Pressflow, a high performance version of Drupal. Furthermore, Apache kept crashing and it was giving us downtime, sometimes even when we had advertisers on the phone. We had AdaptiveTheme sprite all the images in our theme to reduce server requests. We swapped to using nginx, varnish, memcache, InnoDB (with the my-huge.cnf), APC and PHP fast-cgi, and this massively increased performance and reduced server load.
Many people have said that Drupal doesn't scale. We found this to not be true at all- like all web apps, you need to go the extra mile to build an infrastructure around it that supports performance. Tuning of web servers and database servers can make Drupal as quick as anything!
WikiJob Roundup
It's been an amazing ride for us. Drupal has been a key ingredient for us from the early days. It has made it easy for us to build the site, to grow the site and to continue to maintain and update the site with new features and functionality. It was the right decision to rely on Drupal and the open source community for our infrastructure. I am certain WikiJob will continue to use Drupal for the foreseeable future, and I would recommend anyone creating a site on a budget to strongly consider using Drupal as well.
For more information, get in touch!