eToro and eToroX: the exchange website, campaign pages and web apps

eToro is an international trading and investment platform from Tel Aviv, and eToroX was the group’s crypto exchange. I worked on both from December 2018 to mid-2022, through CGSpark, a Tel Aviv web and mobile studio.

It started with a four-page mini site. The studio came back for landing pages and e-mail templates, then I became the main developer of the eToroX website, in a team of two to five, and later built eToro’s campaign pages, the eToro Money availability app and part of the eToro Digital Assets site. We worked with daily stand-ups, eToro’s Jira and eToro’s own QA.

Projects

1. 2018

   Responsive static mini site for eToroX

   A four-page static site for eToroX from the studio’s design, with a subscribe form and the script behind it.

   We agreed on plain HTML on Bootstrap 4 with the code in GitLab, and split the build into five milestones, so each page was reviewed on its own. The design covered About, Wallet and Contact only on desktop. I designed their phone layouts myself. A small Node.js mail script passes each new subscriber to the site owner.

   All four pages and the script were delivered in December 2018, and that contract opened three and a half years of work on eToroX and eToro.

   Stack: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, Node.js

2. 2019

   WordPress landing pages for eToroX

   Landing pages for eToroX built from designs inside WordPress, plus one reusable responsive landing-page template.

   I laid out the pages from the designs and set them up in WordPress, so the team could run them. The reusable template, on Bootstrap and jQuery, has a header with a title and text, a main block and a footer, and its phone layouts match the eToroX site. By the end of July 2019 the work moved on to the exchange’s own website.

   Stack: WordPress, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, jQuery

3. 2019

   Responsive HTML e-mail templates for eToroX

   Three responsive HTML e-mail templates for eToroX, two transactional and one commercial, built from blocks and tested across mail clients.

   I coded them from the designs in July 2019, with tables and inline styles, and tested them in Email on Acid on desktop and mobile clients, including Outlook on a Windows screen set to 120%. In Outlook I fixed the footer size and alignment, blue borders and a white line in the blue section. Each template went to the team as a ready package with its test results, and all three render correctly in phone apps, web mail and desktop Outlook.

   Stack: HTML, CSS

4. 2019–2022

   eToroX exchange website on live trading data (WordPress)

   I was the main developer of the eToroX exchange’s WordPress site, where coins, trading pairs, fees and wallet terms come from the exchange API.

   • I built dozens of page templates: home, events, fees, wallet, news, knowledge base, sign-up and crypto-to-fiat pages.
   • I connected the asset, pair and fee pages to the exchange data with live rates and charts.
   • A plugin creates the page for a new coin or pair as soon as it appears in the API.
   • Gated downloads for marketing, with e-mail follow-ups through Mixmax and automatic unsubscribes through SendGrid.
   • In-house plugins: a broken-link crawler, redirects, a sitemap, a cookie notice and a referral bar. Admin access was granted with one Telegram command and taken back by a timer.
   • A separate light home page for phones, with WebP images, lazy loading and third-party scripts waiting for the first tap.

   More than half of all changes to the site’s code over those years are mine. New coins got their pages as soon as the exchange listed them, fee tables were edited in the admin with no developer, and after the first round of optimisation the home page speed score went from about 25 to 96.

   Stack: WordPress, PHP, ACF, REST APIs, JavaScript, Chart.js

5. 2020

   A clean new WordPress theme for the eToroX site

   A clean new theme for the eToroX site, to replace a commercial theme loaded with custom templates, and the move of the live pages into it.

   I built it on the Underscores starter with Bootstrap and kept the plugins to security, SEO, redirects, forms and custom fields. A settings page chooses which Contact Form 7 forms are not stored in the database. Then, one task per page, I moved about twenty templates from the live site: fees, wallet, Lira, tokens, three buy and sell crypto pages, glossary, knowledge base, education and more. I connected the fees page to the exchange’s public market data and reworked the news and article templates.

   By May 2020 the new site had its theme, its plugins and about twenty working templates, most of that code written by me.

   Stack: WordPress, PHP, ACF, Bootstrap, JavaScript

6. 2020–2022

   WordPress site for eToro Digital Assets, in a team

   Content pages, the footer and the contact flow for the eToro Digital Assets website, in the studio’s shared theme, one ticket per page.

   I built the About eToro Digital Assets, About eToro Group and Tokens pages and the Our Values and Transparency sections, then a new footer, the Contact Us page with its form, and the Coming Soon and 404 templates. I also fixed mobile bugs across devices, down to the footer on the iPhone 5.

   The main build ran from mid-November to mid-December 2020, and more than half of the theme’s commits are mine. I last updated the contact page and its success message in March 2022.

   Stack: WordPress, PHP, Sass, JavaScript

7. 2021

   Vue landing page with its content in MongoDB

   An eToroX landing page whose texts and images change without touching the code. The task set the stack: Vue, a Node.js server and MongoDB.

   I built the page in Vue from the design. The texts and images live in MongoDB, and a Node.js server hands them to the page. I deployed it on Heroku so the studio could review a working page on a public link, and delivered it on 3 November 2021, ready for QA, with the full source.

   Stack: Vue, Node.js, MongoDB, Heroku

8. 2021–2022

   Rebuilding the eToroX website as a light WordPress theme

   The eToroX website rebuilt on a light theme with no jQuery and a minimal plugin set, with trading-pair pages built from the exchange’s asset API. My part was the trading pages, content templates and plugins.

   • I built the trading-pair template with charts, and the exchange, all-pairs, exchange FAQ and glossary templates on ACF.
   • An API endpoint for the policy matrix by country, the pair’s price in the page title, and admin settings for tracking codes and the cache version.
   • Three plugins: coin icons pulled from the API on a schedule with a review queue, redirects with a statistics page, and a CSV importer for the policy matrix. Later we removed two of them, the light version didn’t need them.
   • I audited the old site’s plugins and listed what could go. The sitemap moved to the SEO plugin’s built-in one.
   • While moving the content I fixed links that pointed at test servers, and flagged the pairs missing from the API to the studio.

   The new site went live on etorox.com in June 2022, lighter than the one before and with far fewer plugins to maintain.

   Stack: WordPress, PHP, ACF, JavaScript, Sass

9. 2021–2022

   Campaign landing pages and a landing-page server (Node.js)

   A landing-page server and campaign pages for eToro marketing, each page with its tracking, legal disclaimers and rules per regulator.

   • In November 2021 I wrote a landing-page server on Node.js, Express and Pug, where a new campaign is just a template and a route. The team later made it the base of the shared production server for eToro campaign pages.
   • On it and in Angular I built campaign pages: Christmas and Valentine’s cashback, «How to own MANA», «Time is Money» for crypto staking and the eToro Money country check, each with its Google Analytics and Tag Manager events and its disclaimer.
   • An internal link generator takes the site, regulator, language and campaign and gives back a tracked link. The second version reads the server’s page list, so every new page shows up in it by itself.
   • Unreleased pages sat behind a password and noindex. Redirects, a 404 page and a visit counter ran on Express and MySQL.

   Four of these pages still answer on eToro’s campaign domain, among them the staking page.

   Stack: Node.js, Express, Pug, Angular, TypeScript, MySQL

10. 2022

    Country availability app for eToro Money (Angular)

    An Angular app showing where eToro Money’s account and debit card are available, kept current as the product opened in new countries.

    I built it in Angular 13 from the design: a responsive table of countries against the two products, with a banner for the countries still to come. I set up the country list and the disclaimer so marketing could extend them without a redesign, connected Google Tag Manager and deployed it on the team’s landing-page server next to the other campaign pages.

    It launched in February 2022 with the UK only. Cyprus, Ireland, Romania, Spain and Italy followed as eToro Money expanded, each one a small change in a list, with the URL, footer and disclaimer updated after QA. By July it covered six countries, and almost all of its code is mine.

    Stack: Angular, TypeScript, Sass