PinkNews relaunches website

In November 2022, we launched a brand new website to be as inclusive and accessible as possible for our global audience, looking at the project through the lens of what is best from our wide range of readers’ perspectives. Our goal was to elevate PinkNews to a whole new level by extending the reach of our content globally whilst ensuring the highest levels of inclusivity and accessibility as possible – everything from font sizes to colour contrasts was taken into consideration. At the same time, we wanted to create something scalable that adhered to SEO guidelines so we could grow our organic traffic.

Our tech team over the course of six months, embarked on a huge project to help improve the accessibility, inclusivity and reach of our LGBTQ+ content to ensure it could be accessed by as many people as possible. The team rebuilt the entire website and apps from scratch following WCAG guidelines to make them as inclusive and accessible as possible. They switched our domain to a .com to increase our visibility globally and upgraded our CMS to give our editorial team more control over how we present and curate our content. Content that elevates marginalised voices and highlights the diversity of the entire LGBTQ+ spectrum. 

Key new features of the PinkNews website are:

Accessibility

By adhering to the global W3C process and its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) we’re hoping to make the new PinkNews website as inclusive and as accessible as possible. We’ve incorporated the following improvements:

  • New design and layout, using a component library that easily scales to suit multiple devices
  • Colours used have passed accessibility tests for visually impaired people
  • Correct image labelling to ensure the best experience for people using screen readers
  • Enabled text-to-speech functionality on articles, so our audience will be able to listen to stories
  • Choosing a font that is easy to read
  • Incorporated elastic-search to make it quicker and easier for readers to find what they are looking for
  • We’ve rolled out AI powered text-to-speech across all of our articles and will soon be launching a video tool to let our readers watch the words read to you, this creates a more immersive and easy-to-follow speech experience.

Sustainability

The new PinkNews website is now within the top 7% of global websites tested for emitting fewer carbon emissions, a sustainability improvement of 70% (websitecarbon.com).  This has been done by the website running more efficiently through writing cleaner code, optimising images and improving SEO, which reduces the time it takes people to find what they are looking for. 

The PinkNews digital experience offers our audience an accessible and inclusive environment to read global news stories based on politics, entertainment, culture and lifestyle told through the PinkNews lens. Our audience will be able to set preferences, view curated content linked to their desired choices and react to articles using our emoji reactions tool. By monitoring how our readers respond to articles we can then use this to curate our content for the wider PinkNews audience, for example rounding up our most heart-warming stories to share with our newsletter subscribers or highlighting the stories that have got our audience all fired up on our homepage.

Results

Our new website, which was relaunched last year, has had some extremely positive feedback since launch and we are seeing very positive figures from our audience engaging with the site.

Our accessibility score on Google Core Web Vitals is 95/100, a massive jump from a score of 50/100 pre-launch. We’re aiming for this score to be 100/100 by the end of summer this year. Our SEO has also jumped to 99/100.

Our organic search traffic continues to increase by 100% YoY, with a 20% increase in traffic overall and a 15% increase in recirculation traffic, showing how our audience is moving around the site with greater ease due to the new easy-to-navigate format. As a result, our page views per session have more than doubled since we launched.. We have also seen a 25% increase in direct traffic.  The new PinkNews website is now within the top 7% of global websites tested for emitting fewer carbon emissions, a sustainability improvement of 70 per cent (websitecarbon.com). This decrease has been achieved by the website running more efficiently through writing cleaner code, optimising images and improving SEO, which reduces the time it takes people to find what they are looking for.