Revolutionizing Event Booking: Eventflare’s Transition To High-Performance, Svelte-Powered Platform
Eventflare, previously known as Spacehuntr is an event services company based in Belgium, the company aims to provide premium, around the clock event venue booking services to customers primarily all across Europe, Americas and recently Middle East, with their specialities in Hospitality, Event management, Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions ( MICE ) and E-Commerce. During the Spacehuntr period, the website was fully based on WordPress, the monolithic CMS. Aiming to provide a faster and streamlined experience to its customers, Spacehuntr approached Zealousweb for rebuilding the current website from its roots.
Challenge
Performance was one of the major reasons to switch to Svelte with the original WordPress based application showing its age. Being a monolithic platform where both frontend and backend are coupled, system upgrades and changes can cause outages and slow load time.
Difficulties in implementing various functionalities, and ways of data representation based on various viewports.
Implementing a highly complex functionality can have several obstacles not in terms of implementation but also in performance and related outputs, with scope being limited to basic templates.
Monolithic platforms are difficult to scale, particularly as consumer behavior shifts rapidly and the need to personalize and expand content.
Solution
- Implementing a highly reactive page with stage management with seamless transitions, data management, manipulation and sharing with several components working simultaneously- best references are of the Search Page where the data would update and display in real time when changes made to the DOM, such as applying new filters and interacting with Google Maps; dynamic cost calculations for Listings with factors such as – Time Slots, Days selected, Pricing of caterings per individual region and so on.
- While the community is now filled with several Svelte enthusiasts developing amazing and out of the box packages, during the initial development the Svelte ecosystem had a few dedicated libraries. Thankfully the obstacles were overcome due to Svelte’s compatibility with Vanilla Javascript libraries and playing around with the code to suit client’s requirements.
- A lot of optimizations were made to multiple pages with highly complex functionalities, which also included dependencies and various state management requirements. Svelte being independent of ‘Virtual DOM’ eliminates all the unnecessary performance overhead by direct DOM manipulation.
- Not all the pages in the mobile view followed the same layout as the desktop counterpart. A lot of components were modified both in terms of design and functionality to meet the client requirements whilst aiming for minimal performance overhead.
- One of the most complex features of the Eventflare project is the Calendar component paired with the Booking Reservation functionality. Upon successful booking, the dates would be blocked from all the Calendars and filter searches, also providing the functionality of importing .ics files from any sources and displaying data in correspondence, thus providing up-to-date information to Eventflare’s clients.
- Out of the box Sveltekit provides a very easy way of implementing rendering methods such as Server Side Rendering ( SSR ) which is crucial for SEO, as well as methods such as Static Site Generation ( SSG ) for creating extremely fast static pages.
- Svelte is widely known for doing everything under the hood and it’s syntactic sugar, this enables an ease in development with next to none boilerplate code, ensuring quicker deliveries in comparison to other Javascript frameworks. Code less, deliver more.
Result
Eventflare now often tops Google’s search results for Event venue booking services in Europe.
Eventflare has been expanding their business boundaries from Europe and Americas now to the Middle East. Also partaking in providing venue booking services for mega events such as Ethereum’s Devcon, recently held in Istanbul.
Eventflare was awarded Zealousweb’s Project of the Year in the year 2022.
Compared to their competitors, Eventflare now excels at attracting new customers with serving feature rich content at high speeds.Highly complex pages load at a fraction of their previous recorded times, like home-page loading nearly within a second and search page within 2-4 seconds.
As the head of Eventflare, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with ZealousWeb on the monumental task of transforming our online platform. Our move from a traditional WordPress setup to a dynamic, Svelte-based site was ambitious, but ZealousWeb rose to the challenge with exceptional skill and innovation. Their solution, focusing on performance optimization, custom functionality, and SEO-friendly design, has not only revitalized our website but also catapulted us to the top of Google search results. The impact of this transformation is evident in our expanded reach from Europe to the Middle East and our role in major events like Ethereum’s Devcon in Istanbul. We are thrilled with the results, which have earned Eventflare recognition as Zealousweb’s Project of the Year 2022. The enhanced performance and faster load times of our site have been crucial in attracting new customers and providing rich content swiftly. We extend our deepest gratitude to ZealousWeb for their outstanding work and look forward to future projects with their talented team.
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