Since 1966, MyBaseGuide (MBG) has provided essential information to military personnel and families seeking information about U.S. military installations and bases. Alley partnered with JumpCrew (MBG’s parent company) to implement a redesign of their web presence. We worked together to establish a new WordPress multisite instance to serve as the foundation for MBG, and consulted on migrating decades of content and installation guides to their new home. We’re proud of the final result and are excited to see how JumpCrew continues to grow and expand upon the relaunch.
The updated design focuses on user experience, making it easier for existing and future MBG visitors to discover meaningful content for their daily lives. We once again partnered with our friends at WordPress VIP Go to deploy MBG on their WordPress and Node hosting infrastructure. Launch couldn’t have gone smoother, especially when you consider what’s going on under the hood! In addition to a headless React frontend using our Irving framework, MBG presented many challenges. The complex relationship between various post types required strategic thinking to implement, and we offered our expertise in SEO, accessibility, and web performance to deliver.
Aley has learned a lot about headless architecture over the past couple of years, and this project presented some unique challenges. One of the biggest pain points for a decoupled setup is ensuring the vast library of open-source plugins available in the WordPress ecosystem function as expected. During development of MBG we engineered integrations with Gravity Forms and Yoast SEO, allowing JumpCrew to take advantage of these powerful and ubiquitous plugins. It’s always an interesting challenge, and our developers are constantly working on new solutions like these in fresh situations.
MyBaseGuide.com is the latest headless WordPress site in Alley’s portfolio. We recommended Irving to JumpCrew as the foundation for this rebuild, which has resulted in some incredible performance improvements across the board. Upon launch, we saw the First Contentful Paint drop 76% to 0.7 seconds, initial and subsequent load requests decreased by 75% and 85%, respectively, and total load time decreased by 52% from 6.6 seconds to 3.2 seconds.
With the relaunch of MBG, JumpCrew now has a multisite WordPress instance which will act as the foundation for future JumpCrew properties. VIP Go will allow these sites to scale, which is crucial for performance. WordPress’ familiar and well-established CMS interface is an exciting improvement for MBG’s many contributors and content managers. The JumpCrew team is thrilled to see how MBG’s content managers and contributors take advantage of the new suite of tools and functionality available to them.
We’re excited to see how these changes positively impact the lives of My Base Guide’s audience, and we’ll be around to keep improving them in the future!