DECA Dental Group is a nationwide association of dentist offices, comprised of several brands and more than 120 individual offices. We worked closely with DECA and their partners to create a stable, flexible web platform with websites for each brand and office, and a host of integrations and automations, all managed from a single WordPress admin area.
DECA's previous platform had significant maintainability, usability, and performance issues caused by poorly optimized database structure, outdated server configuration, and inefficient code. After a comprehensive audit, we addressed each of these challenges with a ground-up rewrite, fine-tuned server provisioning, and continuous deployment automations for both production and staging servers.
Here are some high-level technical stats comparing the platform before and after the rebuild.
| DB | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Tables | 91 | 13 |
| Rows | 193,219 | 108,260 |
| Size | 80MB | 12MB |
| Code | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Lines | 61,646 | 18,535 |
| Size | 7.1MB | 1.3MB |
| Perf | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Avg Page Size | 1.8MB | 498KB |
| Avg Load Time | 4.1s | 2.8s |
Deca Dental’s top priority was achieving meaningful control of the platform’s content and assets. We created a custom WordPress theme and API, providing both global and fine control for content authors, and secure integrations with Deca's partners.
We focussed on extending DECA/'s well-established visual brand throughout the the web UI. We introduced global spacing/sizing and component-based design to maintain visual consistency. We identified 2 primary user stories (gather information, act on information), and we leveraged these to organize the content and navigation.
DECA Dental’s new platform provides all the benefits of a modern CMS, with special capabilities provided by a thoughtfully-constructed theme, and a small number of carefully chosen pro-grade plugins. This provides editors with the ability to make batch edits across all entries in a given content type, or drill down to edit a single field of a single entry.
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