Goodyear India: Taking a GTmetrix F to an A, and Turning 123 Features Into 8 Insights

Goodyear needed to build an immersive, experiential website relevant to each of its distinct customer personas, using design, experience, and functional solutions that would drive both brand preference and business results. Before any rebuild, ibs Fulcro ran a full audit: technical performance, UI/UX findings, a competitive scan of category and iconic global websites, and a persona-and-journey mapping exercise, to define exactly what the new site needed to deliver.

CEAT's site shows a clean layout with a hero banner carousel, an SEO-heavy menu linking to all popular car tyre models, and a highlighted claims section with built-in tracking. Home-page tyre discovery works through vehicle and model selection as well as direct tyre number search, backed by discovery tiles for each tyre range. The dealer locator uses pin-code search with popular cities called out directly. FAQs are structured for content-snippet indexing, and the product experience follows an e-commerce pattern with add-to-cart functionality and a familiar product display page layout.

Apollo's home page acts as a gateway to each tyre category with a bold, mobile-first UI, and a persistent cart in the footer gives the site an e-commerce feel, though actual online payment appears to be absent. Product ranges get dedicated feature sections, and SEO-optimized content snippets appear at the bottom of key pages. Search supports full-text search with autocomplete. The checkout flow does not show payment completion; it instead routes to booking a dealer appointment, meaning the e-commerce journey effectively ends at the point of dealer contact rather than completed purchase. The dealer locator successfully detects location and zooms the map appropriately, but does not support driving directions.

Bridgestone's site is comparatively minimal, focused on imagery over SEO, content, or lead generation. The main menu is oriented more toward the company than its products, and while products are segregated by segment, the layout breaks in places and products are not listed in an easy-to-browse format. Every product discovery journey pushes toward a dealer interaction rather than a self-serve online path, and product display pages resemble Amazon A+ content style. The dealer locator detects location, but the presentation of dealer information is confusing.

The audit and competitive scan identified 123 distinct benchmarked features across all sites reviewed. These were deduplicated and prioritized down to 58 candidate features, then distilled further into 8 core insights, which in turn defined a single unifying vision for the new site.

The insighting phase mapped five distinct persona groups across the full awareness-to-advocacy journey: retail consumers (an IT professional, an environmental consultant seeking eco-friendly tyres, a motorsports enthusiast, a travel blogger), institutional buyers (fleet managers and procurement heads managing 50 to 100+ vehicle fleets), trade partnership seekers (dealers, retailers, and distributors looking to expand or begin a Goodyear relationship), career seekers (from recent graduates to experienced engineers evaluating Goodyear as an employer), and investors (analysts and portfolio managers evaluating Goodyear's financial performance).

Each persona group received its own mapped journey and a "red path", the shortest, most critical route through the site for that persona's primary goal. The institutional buyer red path, for example, runs from Product Finder through Product Listing and Product Page directly to a Purchase Enquiry and Partner Locator, a fundamentally different path from the retail consumer's, which includes AR/VR visualization and video consultation before reaching checkout.

The audit produced an exact ideal form structure rather than a general recommendation. Required fields are Name, Mobile (validated by OTP), Email, and Pin Code, with explicit WhatsApp consent captured alongside. The technical specification defines exact input types for each field: text for name, tel for mobile, email for email, and text with a postal-code field id for pin code, so mobile devices trigger the correct native autofill behavior. reCAPTCHA v3 is specified for spam protection, chosen for its lower friction compared to challenge-based captchas.