Chelsea Toronto, a leading hotel business, was in a critical situation when its website, a key platform for online booking and reservations, went offline for two days. This unexpected downtime hugely impacted the business, as it also had ads and marketing campaigns that depended on its website.
Seeking urgent assistance, Chelsea Toronto turned to Qode Media for a resolution to make its website more robust, with better performance and user experience. Chelsea Toronto also requested accessibility improvements.
The Chelsea Toronto website was built using Slim PHP with a custom-made CMS and deployed on Akamai CDN. The CDN caches content on a global network of servers, enhancing security and performance. The website outage stemmed from exceptions in the image database, causing the site to go offline. Qode Media’s team of developers promptly investigated the website and backend code, identifying and fixing the database issues. Within a day, the site was back online. Recognizing the need for a more stable solution, the team refactored the entire codebase to improve performance and prevent future instabilities. Additionally, the staging environment was moved to an AWS server, providing enhanced security, performance, and data protection, thus isolating issues before deploying code to the CDN.
Qode Media conducted a comprehensive audit to identify issues and ensure WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance. By prioritizing high-traffic pages, the team systematically addressed and resolved accessibility issues, making the website compliant. Although some fixes are ongoing, most accessibility improvements have been successfully implemented.
Qode Media’s swift and effective action not only resolved Chelsea Toronto’s immediate website issues but also significantly improved the site’s stability, security, and accessibility. As a result, the website has been operating efficiently and steadily, with zero downtime since the implementation of these fixes two years ago, ensuring a seamless and compliant user experience.
