Before Emberoot, our founder Sarang Kasar built and ran HastySurf, a WordPress news and magazine site written for adults and children reading on their phones. It is where he learned SEO, site speed and hosting by doing them.
- Organisation: HastySurf
- Role: Technical Advisor, August 2020 to February 2021
- Platform: WordPress with plugins
- Services used: Websites, Digital marketing
The challenge
HastySurf published news and features for two audiences at once, adults and children, and it was planned for readers on mobile phones. The site needed to be easy to browse by topic, quick on a phone connection, and findable in search without a paid marketing budget.
What Sarang did
- Designed and built the site on WordPress, laid out from the reader’s side: sections for money, technology, entertainment, fashion and lifestyle, business, food, nature, education and health.
- Set up the hosting and ran the site day to day: plugins, updates, backups and admin.
- Worked on speed for phones and raised the mobile PageSpeed score from 68 to 89.
- Handled SEO and wrote blog posts, using SEMrush for keyword research, and learned organic marketing and affiliate marketing along the way.
The result
A news site that loaded noticeably faster on phones, with a mobile PageSpeed score of 89, up from 68. The habits Sarang formed here, checking speed, search and security on every change, are the ones Emberoot still uses on client sites.