Talentbyte

Project Overview

Talentbyte is an IT staffing and nearshore resourcing company headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, founded in 2015. With a team of approximately 10 employees, they specialise in building tech teams and talent pipelines for companies across Central and Eastern Europe, placing software developers, data engineers, and cloud specialists. They operate on Bullhorn as their primary ATS/CRM platform, managing candidate relationships and client accounts across Estonia, Finland, and Romania through a single, heavily customised instance.

Despite a strong reputation in the Baltic tech recruitment market, Talentbyte's website had become a genuine liability. The WordPress site, originally built in 2017 and barely touched since, was hosted on a shared OVH server, loaded slowly on every connection, and had a contact form that silently failed on mobile devices. After losing three inbound client leads in a single month because the enquiry form never delivered their messages, Talentbyte's founder reached out to NodeSparks for a Digital Health Check. The engagement ultimately expanded from a one-off assessment into a full website-focused Digital Operations Package and ongoing maintenance retainer.

The Challenge

When we ran our initial Health Check on Talentbyte's website in May 2025, the results were sobering. The homepage took 9.4 seconds to fully load on a standard European 4G connection, Google PageSpeed Insights scored it at 22 out of 100 for mobile, and the Bullhorn job feed integration had been broken for over four months without anyone noticing. Prospective clients searching for "IT recruitment Estonia" or "tech staffing Tallinn" found nothing -- Talentbyte did not appear in the first 10 pages of Google results for any of their core terms.

• PageSpeed mobile score of 22/100 with 9.4-second full page load time. The site had 14 unused WordPress plugins still active, uncompressed hero images averaging 3.2 MB each, and six render-blocking JavaScript files loading in the header.
• Contact form built with an outdated version of Contact Form 7 silently failed on iOS Safari and Chrome mobile -- form submissions appeared to send but were never delivered. Estimated 35-40% of all inbound enquiries over the previous six months were lost.
• Zero organic search visibility. No meta descriptions on any page, duplicate H1 tags across the site, broken XML sitemap, and the robots.txt file was still set to "Disallow: /" from a staging environment configuration that was never updated at launch.
• Mobile bounce rate of 78% according to Google Analytics data. The site was technically responsive but visually broken on screens under 768px -- navigation menu overlapped content, CTA buttons were unreachable, and text overflowed containers.
• Bullhorn job board integration had been silently failing since January 2025 due to an expired API token. The "Current Openings" page displayed a blank white section with no error message, giving the impression the company had no active roles.

Talentbyte's small internal team had attempted to fix these issues twice before. The first time, they hired a freelance developer through a marketplace who updated some plugins but introduced a JavaScript conflict that broke the navigation menu. The second attempt involved the original web agency that built the site, but they quoted a full redesign at over 12,000 EUR and a four-month timeline. Neither approach addressed the underlying structural problems: the site needed not just cosmetic changes but a proper technical foundation, hosting migration, and an SEO strategy built from scratch.

Our Approach

Step 1: Discovery & Health Check (497 EUR)

• Ran a full-spectrum audit using GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog, and Google Search Console to document every technical deficiency.
• Tested all contact and application forms across 8 browser/device combinations, identifying the silent mobile failure as the highest-priority business risk.
• Analysed 6 months of Google Analytics data to quantify lost traffic, identify high-exit pages, and map the actual user journey versus the intended conversion flow.
• Reviewed the Bullhorn API integration configuration, identified the expired token, and documented the broken job feed rendering.

Step 2: Website-Focused Digital Operations Package (2,997 EUR)

• Migrated hosting from shared OVH to a managed Cloudways stack with server-level caching, HTTP/2, and a Tallinn-proximate CDN node to minimise latency for Baltic and Nordic visitors.
• Stripped the WordPress installation back to essentials: removed 14 unused plugins, replaced Contact Form 7 with Gravity Forms for reliable submissions and Bullhorn CRM routing, and implemented image compression with lazy loading across all pages.
• Rebuilt the mobile experience with a dedicated responsive audit, fixing the navigation overlay, button sizing, and text overflow issues across every breakpoint.
• Implemented foundational on-page SEO: unique meta titles and descriptions for all 23 pages, corrected heading hierarchy, rebuilt the XML sitemap, fixed robots.txt, and submitted to Google Search Console.
• Restored and hardened the Bullhorn job feed integration with automatic token refresh, error logging, and a fallback message for when the API is temporarily unavailable.

Step 3: Ongoing Maintenance Retainer (297 EUR/month)

• Monthly WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates applied in a staging environment first, then deployed to production after testing.
• Quarterly PageSpeed and SEO health checks using GTmetrix and Screaming Frog, with findings reported and remediated proactively.
• Ongoing monitoring of Bullhorn API integration health, form submission delivery rates, and uptime via server-level alerts.

The Solution

• Full migration from shared OVH hosting to managed Cloudways (DigitalOcean High-CPU droplet) with server-level Varnish caching and Brotli compression enabled.
• Image optimisation pipeline: bulk-compressed 147 images (average reduction 81%), implemented WebP conversion with JPEG fallback, and added lazy loading for all below-the-fold media.
• Replaced Contact Form 7 with Gravity Forms across all 5 site forms, with confirmed email delivery, Bullhorn CRM lead routing via webhook, and Slack notification for the sales team.
• On-page SEO overhaul: unique meta titles and descriptions for 23 pages, proper heading hierarchy, schema markup for job postings, rebuilt XML sitemap, and corrected robots.txt.
• Complete responsive rebuild of navigation, hero sections, service cards, and footer across all breakpoints (320px to 1440px) with touch-optimised tap targets.
• Rebuilt Bullhorn job feed integration with automatic API token refresh, structured error handling, and a user-friendly fallback state for temporary API unavailability.
• Configured Google Analytics 4 event tracking for form submissions, job listing clicks, CTA interactions, and scroll depth to provide actionable conversion data.
• Implemented SSL enforcement, security headers, login URL hardening, and automated daily backups with 30-day retention on Cloudways.

Business and Technical Outcomes

• Google PageSpeed mobile score improved from 22/100 to 84/100; desktop score reached 96/100. All three Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) now pass Google's thresholds.
• Full page load time reduced from 9.4 seconds to 2.3 seconds on standard 4G connections, measured via GTmetrix from a Frankfurt testing node.
• Mobile bounce rate dropped from 78% to 37%, a 41-percentage-point improvement, within the first 8 weeks after launch.
• Form completion rate increased by 67%. Contact form submissions went from an average of 4 per month (with unknown losses) to 11 verified submissions per month within 90 days.
• Organic search traffic increased 213% over 5 months. Talentbyte now ranks on page 1 for "IT recruitment Estonia" and page 2 for "tech staffing Tallinn" in Google.
• Bullhorn job feed restored and hardened. 100% uptime since relaunch, with 23 active job listings now visible on-site and generating an average of 6 candidate applications per week through the website.
• 5.2x return on investment within the first 6 months, calculated against two new client retainers (combined annual value 38,000 EUR) attributed directly to inbound website enquiries that would not have existed before the project.

The Impact

The day-to-day difference for Talentbyte's team was immediate and tangible. Within the first week after launch, the founder reported that their website "actually felt like it belonged to a real company." Client calls now regularly began with references to specific service pages rather than vague enquiries, suggesting visitors were genuinely reading the site content before reaching out. The sales team, which previously relied almost entirely on LinkedIn outreach and referrals, began receiving a steady stream of inbound leads through the rebuilt contact forms -- something that had effectively not happened in over a year.

Three months after the project completed, the improvements had compounded. Organic traffic continued to climb as Google re-indexed the properly structured pages, and the Bullhorn job feed was consistently generating candidate applications without any manual intervention. Talentbyte used the improved website as a credibility anchor when pitching to a large Finnish fintech client, and their Head of Operations specifically noted that the clean, fast-loading job board was a factor in choosing to work with a smaller agency. By month five, the website had directly contributed to two significant new client engagements that would not have been possible with the previous site.

Looking forward, the maintenance retainer ensures that these gains are not only sustained but built upon. The technical foundation is now solid enough to support future additions -- including a planned blog for content marketing, a client portal integrated with Bullhorn, and potential expansion pages as Talentbyte grows its presence into the Polish and German tech markets. The architecture is ready; they just need to grow into it.