Thanda is a luxury hospitality and conservation group offering exclusive safari lodges in South Africa, a private island retreat in Tanzania, and classic cruises across the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Their experiences combine high-end travel with a strong commitment to wildlife conservation, community development, and sustainability. Through Thanda Safari, Thanda Island, and Thanda Classic Cruise, they provide guests with unforgettable adventures while supporting local communities and protecting endangered ecosystems.
Our parent company, Ruby Digital, manages monthly SEO for both Thanda Island and Thanda Safari and identified that site speed required improvement. To address this, RubyWeb recommended a multisite separation, as the performance issues stemmed from hosting four websites on the same server. The goal was to enhance overall site speed and, in turn, deliver a better user experience.
The Thanda website faced performance challenges as it was hosted on a U.S.-based WordPress multisite server that supported four different websites simultaneously. To improve speed and reliability, we recommended separating the sites and migrating each onto its own high-performance hosting server in South Africa. While the project took longer than anticipated due to technical issues encountered during the domain transfers with the previous hosting provider, we successfully resolved these challenges and completed the migration, resulting in improved site performance and user experience.
We successfully completed the separation of the Thanda multisite into four standalone websites, each hosted on its own dedicated server. This restructuring was designed to significantly improve site speed and deliver a faster, more seamless browsing experience for users.
The migration was executed with care, ensuring that all essential data was preserved throughout the process. As a result, the websites now benefit from noticeably improved performance, which has translated into enhanced user experiences, reduced bounce rates, and longer average session durations.
To further optimize speed, we implemented Cloudflare as a Content Delivery Network (CDN), streamlined all images, and configured individual caching setups for each site. Our team is proud of this achievement and remains committed to delivering exceptional website performance for our clients.
By migrating the four Thanda websites into their own dedicated environments, we achieved substantial improvements in overall performance. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was reduced to under 2 seconds, ensuring that above-the-fold content loads quickly for users. Total loading times across all sites were brought below 6 seconds, faster than the industry average of 6+ seconds in the travel sector, placing Thanda’s websites well above benchmark standards.
Prior to the split, initial load times ranged between 2.5 and 4 seconds. After separation, these consistently dropped below 2 seconds, delivering a noticeably smoother browsing experience. User engagement metrics confirmed the impact: Thanda Safari recorded a 21.37% increase in average session duration and a 7.86% decrease in bounce rate, while Thanda Island saw a 6.27% increase in session duration and a 10.09% decrease in bounce rate.
Overall, site speed across the Thanda portfolio improved by 52.17%. Since the separation, each website has experienced measurable gains in speed and usability, resulting in a faster, more engaging, and user-friendly experience.
