Togg Website Review

June 19, 2023March 20, 2024

Togg, Turkey’s Electric Car Project owned by a private joint venture (Turkcell, Zorlu, BMC, Anadolu Group and TOBB). You can have more detailed info on their Wikipedia page

About Review

I have no political intentions in doing this review. I support the Togg project wholeheartedly although it became a political tool, it’s a national project which is run by companies that are very professional in their industries.

The Review

Let’s start. Actually, the website is a relatively small website in terms of content.

Here is the table of contents:

Homepage
Discovery Page ( Car info page for TX10 Model, which is the only model for now)
Trumore (They call their mobile app Trumore. App is available for Apple, Android, and Huawei mobile phones)
Touch Points (Service, Delivery, Experience Locations)
Togg Care ( Contact Us Page)
About Us
Join Us (Career Page)
FAQ
Log in ( Login to Trumore App from the Web)

1. Language and Meta Problems

The website has two languages and you can select Turkish or English versions, which is expected behaviour.

1.1: The website does not have a specific URL for each language

The website was developed as if it is a mobile application in which you can switch languages easily by changing text content to the desired language. The developers may think that it is better as it is the faster approach. But actually, it is not the default behaviour for a website.

1.2 You can not share a specific language version of the webpage

Currently, you can not share English or Turkish-specific versions of the website or any sub-pages on the website. The default language is selected according to your browser’s language. If you want to share a webpage with someone who speaks Turkish, you basically can not do it, because the default language is set to English, and the Turkish version is loaded only if the browser language is set to Turkish.

1.3 Google will not index the Turkish version of the website

You can not index both language versions of the site with the current architecture. Only the default language will get indexed by search engines.

1.4 Bonus: The website is not indexed by search engines at all

I don’t know whether this is a decision made by the company management or not, but the software company made the site to be NOT indexed by search engines. It is done via a header directive sent by the server (this can be by mistake too if the company does not have a specific request for this). You can see the directive below picture taken from the response header of togg.com.tr.

x-robots-tag: noindex

I think Togg wants to be shown on search engines as they do advertisements for their brand name on Google.

1.5 Schema: Page meta tags and schema info are missing

As a result, if you share the website on any social media, the summary or title, or thumbnail image of the webpage can not be fetched.

1.6 FAQ link not working

Error is shown when the FAQ link is clicked anywhere on the website. If links are not working, they should be removed completely from the website (and from the navigation).

2. Front-end Coding Problems

2.1 Responsive but not Mobile First Coding

Mobile-first coding is the standard for any website built within the last 5 years. Mobile first means the CSS coding is done according to the mobile version of the website first, and load extra code if the screen size is bigger (tablet, desktop). This provides the fastest mobile loading speed for the website. And Google already considers the mobile version of the website rather than the desktop version in their ranking algorithm.

2.2 Not-used fonts are loaded

The website uses a custom font called Fedra but unused fonts are also loaded on CSS.

2.3 Font size loaded on the website is way too much: 1 megabyte

Custom fonts are part of new modern websites as internet speed is quite high compared to 10-20 years ago. But the technical team should not load too many files if it is not really needed. The designer used 4 different versions of the font, and each costs 250KB font file to be downloaded. So the Technical lead should warn/discuss with the designer to limit the font variation to 2 at most if possible.

2.4 Icons are exported as PNG files from design, whereas SVG format should be used

PNG export is not high quality ( it should load a higher resolution version according to the device’s screen resolution) but if it was SVG, you should not worry about the quality & resolution of the device

3. UI/UX Problems

3.1 Spacing problem between captcha and button

There is a spacing problem between send button and the captcha.

3.2 Location recognition is not working

Although I connected to the website with a mobile internet connection and mobile phone which the developer can get my location very precisely, it can not.

3.3 Map is not working properly on mobile

The map is not working as expected. When you enter the map area after some struggle, you can not go out of the map.

3.4 Savings calculator app is working very slowly

I tried to calculate savings through the saving calculator app, but I thought it was not working at all as it took more than 3-5 seconds to respond. I clicked multiple times to calculate the button as I could not get any response. Bad user experience.

4. Website Speed

The website is developed using the Angular framework which is created by Google and was quite popular 5 years ago. But I think it should not be used on any company website, or e-commerce projects because of its file size. It can be used on SaaS or game projects as it has good rules and MVC architecture to manage code bases for big projects. But for Togg‘s website, it is overkill and over-expensive in terms of file size.

4.1 Mobile Speed: 5 seconds, Speed Index: 12 seconds > Very Slow

You can do a live test here on Google’s PageSpeed test tool.