Elisabeth Hoff – Optimising Digital Performance for a Leading Celebrity & Fashion Photographer
London-based celebrity and fashion photographer Elisabeth Hoff is renowned for her signature visual aesthetic, creative direction, and handling of A-list clients.
She has created campaigns for Ann Summers, Avon, and L'Oréal, and celebrities Abbey Clancy, Ant & Dec, and Bear Grylls, to name just a few.
As a visual artist, Elisabeth's website is important, not as a collection in the purest form, but as an online manifestation of her brand. It needs to be an expression of her work and function perfectly, with the same level of polish and professionalism that her photography has become known for.
The Challenge
The team at Elisabeth Hoff came to us with two key issues:
Poor search engine visibility
Despite Elisabeth's portfolio reputation, the website was not doing well in terms of industry-specific keywords or even branded search. There was no content strategy framework to follow, and key landing pages lacked technical optimisation that would enable optimal SEO performance.
Critical site performance and UX issues
The site, like all but the smallest design portfolios, was image-heavy with high-res images. Beautiful, perhaps, but at the expense of extremely long page load times, particularly on mobile, which were causing high bounce rates and overall poor UX. Google's Core Web Vitals scores were low, jeopardizing the site further penalties in organic search rankings.
The Solution
Our solution was to maintain form and function in perfect harmony - retaining the visual integrity of Elisabeth's brand while building a technically solid, search-optimised, and speedy-loading platform beneath.
Full-Site SEO Overhaul
We started with a technical and on-page SEO review of the entire website. Then we created a set of high-impact improvements:
Organised metadata and schema to increase search engine understanding and classification of key pages and images.
Keyword-based content creation for landing pages, focusing on search terms for Elisabeth's business, fashion, and celebrity photography services.
URL structure, image alt text, and heading structure optimisations to ensure all pages were correctly indexed and ranked.
We also designed a consistent model for content strategy so that Elisabeth's team could produce subject-relevant articles, behind-the-scenes features, and project spotlights - each serving a definite SEO intent, without affecting the site's look.
Media Optimisation for Performance
Photography sites are slow-loading, and that was the technical reason for Elisabeth's portfolio.
To overcome this, we:
Converted all video and image assets to next-gen formats (WebP and MP4/H.265), lowering file sizes exponentially without losing any quality.
Added lazy loading for non-critical media to maximize initial page rendering speed.
Inserted caching layers and a CDN (content delivery network) to globally load assets more effectively.
Enhanced code and script executions to remove redundant loading dependencies.
User Experience Improvements
Speed and SEO weren't the only factors - small but significant adjustments were also made to navigation, page structure, and calls to action, making it easy for visitors to navigate and access the full richness of Elisabeth's work.
We made sure that both desktop and mobile experiences were equally solid, with a focus on touchpoints such as the gallery responsiveness, swipe behavior, and intelligent internal linking to activate users.
The Results
All together, technical SEO, media optimisation, and content strategy have provided Elisabeth Hoff's website with impressive results:
Google Core Web Vitals are now over 90 on mobile and desktop - a massive leap for a creative portfolio website.
Page load time has been improved by more than 70%, lowering bounce rates and significantly enhancing mobile user engagement.
The website is now search-optimised in its entirety, with landing pages indexing and ranking on industry and branded terms appropriate to the company.
Elisabeth's team have a scalable content strategy that allows them to take ownership of long-term SEO growth without continuous external input.