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Oklahoma wildlife agency reports 11 million annual page views after website redesign
Summary
The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation reported a website redesign, new user-facing forms and admin efficiencies, and analytics showing more than 11 million page views in 2024 during a commission meeting. Staff also demonstrated an interactive hunter leaderboard and a new boating/fishing access application.
The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation told commissioners on an agency meeting that improvements to wildlifedepartment.com have boosted engagement and made several staff workflows faster.
Web developer Carrie Gardner, who led the redesign, said the site was upgraded from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 and that search-engine-optimization tools were added to help staff improve page visibility. “The website was upgraded from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, which improves performance, security, and long term support,” Gardner said.
Gardner said the site received more than 11,000,000 page views in 2024 and recorded about 2,300,000 active users, with an average engagement time of two minutes, six seconds—well above a cited industry benchmark of 52 seconds. Mobile traffic now approaches 80 percent of visits, and female users make up about 36 percent of the audience, Gardner said.
The presentation showed several new and updated forms for users. Gardner demonstrated a reworked “report wildlife” form with an interactive map that captures coordinates, and a new boating and fishing access application that includes a live budgeting tool. Gardner also showed a hunters’ leaderboard (the “Okie Curtis” program) that allows users to search by hunter name, county, method and year, view submitted photos, and optionally read a hunter’s story.
For staff, Gardner said the verification and certificate process is roughly 50 percent faster; a step that previously took about 13 minutes per submission now takes about five to six minutes, she said. “A major improvement is the elimination of redundant data entry,” Gardner said, demonstrating the admin workflow that automatically populates harvest certificates for printing.
Commissioners asked about privacy and artificial intelligence. Gardner said information submitted to the leaderboard is public but that not “all information is going to be public,” and that while AI could be helpful for answering user questions, it must be implemented carefully to ensure accuracy.
The commission did not take any formal action on the website during the meeting. Staff said seasonal trends continue to drive page popularity—hunting pages perform best in late summer through winter while fishing pages are most popular in spring and summer—and that monthly email campaigns remain an effective traffic source.
