Empowering at-home healthcare with myLAB Box

When at-home medical testing provider myLAB Box first got in touch, they wanted to improve the accessibility of at-home COVID testing. Here’s how performance enhancements, rapid delivery, and a re-imagined user experience enabled them to make a serious real-world impact.

Services provided

• Product & Engineering Discovery
• Web Development & Design
• Site Speed Improvements
• User Focused Design
• Ongoing Support

High-stakes performance 

When we first met the myLAB Box (MLB) team in March 2020, the US was still in the “early days” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccines were almost a year away, testing centers were overwhelmed, and there were still many “unknowns” about what the future had in store.   

But MLB knew that they could help. They already had effective deployment schemes for other at-home testing programs and had developed an innovative test using saliva—opening an unprecedented opportunity to scale screening and add much-needed capacity to the strained healthcare system and labs.

This cemented myLAB Box’s decision to invest in its web platform. They realized that by improving the performance and accessibility of their site, they could increase their reach—and in the process, their ability to save lives.

The discovery process

Our team dug into myLAB Box’s existing site setup, looking for performance optimizations that could have a real, measurable impact on their targets. We then outlined a solution capable of restoring confidence in their platform’s ability to perform.    

Our goals 

We were able to create a list of goals that would help MLB increase conversions and remain competitive against their competitors’ site experience. 

1. To make meaningful performance improvements
2. To migrate to a new, more powerful hosting platform that can safely and reliably scale
3. To develop and launch at speed for maximum impact
4. To Provide ongoing support as their digital presence continued to grow

These action items led to an additional project further down the line: 

5. To redesign their site, with the goal of allowing users to find what products and services might help them in their medical journey more easily.

Performance improvements 

We like to think of website performance optimization as being similar to fixing up a rocket ship:

Products, services, and content are what make most organizations unique. They’re what drive new business decisions, establish brand loyalty, and, as they evolve, help you keep pushing forward against the competition. They’re the fuel of your ship (and your website!).

But all that high-quality content needs a high-performance website in order to see the best results. By fixing up your rocket ship, you’re able to see what it’s really capable of.

This is something myLAB Box realized, and what spurred them to fine-tune the performance of their own rocket ship, helping them explore new galaxies, and reach the eyes and ears of audiences that they had previously not explored.

We started by focusing on page experience indicators such as Core Web Vitals, to make user experience improvements to the myLAB box site that wouldn’t impact their core features or functionality.

These fixes, amongst other optimizations to their theming and content, helped bring myLAB Box’s average performance score in Google PageSpeed from 57 to 78, passing Core Web Vitals tests as ‘Good’ across the board.

Increased reach, increased impact

Technical improvements gave myLAB Box the best possible foundations for its marketing efforts, with some relatively quick boosts right out of the gate.

It’s a common misconception that SEO is all about the content on your website, and we see a lot of businesses create masses of pages in an attempt to rank highly. The reality is that Google sees your user experience as a major element of site success—and technical performance is a key part of that. 

Without a solid, performant foundation for your website content, it doesn’t matter how well-researched or well-written it is. It will always have an uphill battle when it comes to search ranking. Learn more in our article ‘Core Web Vitals & SEO’.

Delivery at speed

As we mentioned at the top of this study, time was of the essence. The quicker we were able to enact our personalized performance plan, the quicker myLAB Box would be able to begin making an impact.

We assembled an experienced team of performance professionals that got straight to work, analyzing myLAB Box’s existing site setup and making improvements from week one.

Scope was pre-defined based on “quick wins” that would ensure that we were doing the work that had the most impact first. This meant we were able to move their site onto a new hosting platform in just a few weeks and got new backend and frontend optimizations to handle demand at scale shortly thereafter.

Moving to a new hosting provider

To improve myLAB Box’s backend performance, we suggested working with one of our strategic partners who we knew would be able to provide the security, performance, and reliability they needed to succeed. 

“myLAB Box wanted to improve the scalability and performance of their site as they anticipated a high volume of traffic from their COVID-19 product offering. Our WordPress expertise, ability to scale alongside them and long-standing partnership with XWP led to a successful launch and growth.”Head of Expansion Sales, Hosting Platform

We work with a number of preferred agency partners, all of whom share our enthusiasm for performance, and provide highly-scalable, highly-performant platforms for high-traffic, enterprise sites.

Because of our long-standing partnership with MLB’s chosen host, and intricate knowledge of their individual platform standards, we were able to seamlessly migrate mylabbox.com, allowing them to start feeling the benefits quickly—with no need to worry about security issues or downtime.

Site redesign

An evolving brand means an evolved approach

After a successful first launch, the myLAB Box team decided to supercharge their user experience.

MLB had begun to realize that its core brand identity was evolving, and it wanted to accurately reflect its ongoing mission to make personalized healthcare accessible to the American public. 

Working closely with myLAB Box’s Marketing team, we were able to create a design language that accurately reflected their positioning and values. This culminated in a re-imagined user interface that made it quick and easy to navigate the myLAB Box site.

“Witnessing the growth of the myLAB Box brand has truly been rewarding. We are constantly shifting and adapting to different priorities to ensure myLAB Box not only remains competitive but also a leader in the industry”Matt Chung, Senior Project Manager, XWP

The result was a sleek, modern user interface that is as intuitive to use as it is powerful for conversions— powered by a technically performant platform, that keeps it nimble. You can check it out for yourself at myLABbox.com.

The XWP Tonight Show S1E6: featuring Lora Ivanova from myLAB Box

In this episode of the XWP Tonight Show, Amit Sion sat down with Lora Ivanova, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of MyLAB Box to talk about the depth of our partnership and the importance of innovation.

Watch More episodes of the XWP Tonight Show.

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What’s next for XWP & myLAB Box?

At XWP, we love forming long-term partnerships. They allow us to grow together as one while we navigate new realms of digital growth, so we’re delighted to be joining myLABBox as they continue to grow and succeed.

We’re currently working to expand our re-design work to their product listing, blog listing, and blog post pages to ensure consistency of their design language, fuelling their user experience, and maintaining their competitive edge.