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Home design publisher Apartment Therapy unveiled a website redesign earlier this month, featuring new, sponsorable site capabilities and a community forum to foster onsite engagement.
The renovation is part of a larger effort from parent company Apartment Therapy Media, which also owns The Kitchn, Cubby and Dorm Therapy, to encourage reader retention and spur registration, according to president Riva Syrop.
“Some of what we’re doing is in anticipation of what’s happening, and some is a reaction,” Syrop said. “But generally, where traffic comes from is changing, so we need to come to own our audience or completely change our business model.”
Apartment Therapy is the latest in a series of online publishers, including The Verge and Refinery29, to redesign their websites in the hopes of creating a stickier user experience.
As social platforms and search engines throttle referral traffic to publisher domains, digital media companies have responded by enhancing their homepages in hopes of encouraging readers to linger longer and return more often.
Notably, Apartment Therapy has bucked the trend of declining traffic. According to the publisher, the site is pacing to grow its unique visitors by 8% year over year. However, shifting referral patterns across the industry have prompted the company to act proactively to shore up its existing readership.
The impending deprecation of third-party cookies and signal loss across the web more broadly have similarly spurred Apartment Therapy to strengthen its pool of first-party data.
New, sponsorable site functions and forum
The new redesign, which began in May and is scheduled to conclude by August, involves two primary updates.
First, Apartment Therapy introduced three new features: a filterable database of its popular franchise Before & Afters, a searchable bank of house tours and a filterable Image Browsing Hub. Each feature was also sponsored by an endemic brand: Kohl’s, Homes.com and Sherwin-Williams, respectively.
The three features all serve a pragmatic purpose for readers looking for design inspiration, which it hopes will encourage audiences to treat its website as a tool in addition to a source of inspiration.
In addition to the new features, Apartment Therapy is also in the early stages of launching an onsite forum meant to replicate the community in its popular Apartment Therapist Facebook group.
