The Project at a Glance
- Client: A well-established, mid-sized U.S. higher-ed institution.
- Goal: Replace outdated on‑site search with a fast, personalized experience that keeps prospects exploring.
- Results:
- 40% more successful search outcomes
- 25% increase in page views per session
- Over 160,000 monthly searches
- 15% drop in bounce rate
- <1s average search speed
About the Client
The U.S.-based college needed a smarter way to help students, faculty, and prospective applicants find what they were looking for. They wanted a search tool that could quickly filter through programs, degrees, and departments. Building this directly in WordPress would have been costly and time-intensive, so our team implemented Algolia—a solution that delivered fast, accurate search results at a fraction of the cost.
The Challenge
Before partnering with Bright Code, the college struggled with:
- Irrelevant search results that buried key pages
- No analytics to show what students were actually looking for
- One-size-fits-all results that ignored user context
- Slow performance that frustrated would-be applicants
The college’s old search system often failed to surface the most relevant results, which frustrated users and buried important pages. Customization was also extremely limited—there was no practical way to fine-tune rankings or adjust how results appeared.
The Solution
By implementing Algolia, the institution gained the flexibility to re-rank, customize, and optimize searches, which directly improved the user experience.
Our team implemented Algolia in just one month, iterating through five key steps:
- Defined searchable attributes aligned to program data
- Built custom ranking tied to business metrics
- Added synonyms / removed stop words for natural-language queries
- Created rules for high-value phrases
- Introduced a 3-second delay to optimize load
The Results
- Primary KPI: 40% lift in successful search outcomes
- Supporting KPI 1: 25% more page views per session
- Supporting KPI 2: 15% lower bounce rate
- Speed: Searches now return in under one second
Personalization features and optimization we implemented clearly increased user satisfaction, especially among prospective students using the new Program Finder—they began finding the right program on the first try and exploring deeper instead of bouncing.
Seeing a 40% gain in successful searches confirmed what the institution’s users feel every day—Bright Code made discovery effortless.
Lessons Learned
- Data-driven tuning beats “set-and-forget.” Continuous analytics reveal new ranking tweaks.
- Personalization matters. Tailoring results to user intent lifts engagement fast.
- Business goals turn search into a growth lever. Weighting program pages by enrollment priority (rather than pure keyword frequency) ensured high-value content surfaced first.
