Industry: Legal Services
Site: lawyermarketing.com
Challenge: Large, proprietary software limited FindLaw's ability to accomplish their online goals.
Solution: A move to WP Engine's Premium Plus plan for a smooth migration process, white glove support, and more integration possibilities.
Results: WP Engine served as an extension of the FindLaw team to create a strategic, objective-focused migration process for their 7,000 sites.
FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters company that provides marketing solutions for law firms, online legal information, and services for lawyers, businesses, and individuals. What started with two attorneys compiling online resources for a group of law librarians in Northern California has grown to become the industry’s most comprehensive online listing of lawyers, law firms, and legal service providers. Today, FindLaw.com remains the most popular site for free legal information on the Internet and receives more than 9 million monthly visits.
Having a dedicated account team from WP Engine is an essential part of how FindLaw achieves its business goals and objectives. Our Technical Success Manager and Customer Success Manager help us establish best practices, work efficiently, and take advantage of new innovations-like the new Compute-Optimized infrastructure from Google.
—–Jesse Haraldson, Principal Software Architect
THE SEARCH FOR THE RIGHT CMS AND HOSTING PROVIDER
In addition to FindLaw.com, FindLaw manages some 7,000 legal marketing websites. With such an immense portfolio of digital assets, it’s imperative that FindLaw’s marketing-focused employees use a Content Management System (CMS) that is unquestionably reliable, and able to scale as needed.
In the past, the company relied on large, proprietary software for its content needs, and ultimately experienced issues with efficiency and integrating with external solutions. Opportunities to take advantage of new technologies, like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), were hindered by the ever-present need for tedious and time consuming developer work. As their proprietary systems grew more complex and developer-reliant, the team at FindLaw knew they needed a platform that was easily extensible, well-known, and that fit within their budget.
Rather than repeat their efforts with proprietary software, the FindLaw team looked at open source options and keyed in on WordPress, the most popular open-source CMS in the world. While WordPress offered the FindLaw team the ability to iterate quickly and enable their content creators with powerful tools, they also knew they would need to find a service provider that offered more than just hosting—things like professional backend management and developer tools—so they could focus on their core business: Building successful digital marketing strategies for their clients and providing legal information to the thousands of people who search for it every day.
After evaluating their options, the FindLaw team found that WP Engine was the only service provider able to offer the white glove service and support needed for a migration away from a legacy system to a managed WordPress platform. Through WP Engine’s Premium Plus plan, FindLaw gained access to a dedicated technical and customer success team they were able to leverage for help with their most complicated and time-intensive needs.
PULLING IN THE RIGHT RESOURCES FOR A CHALLENGING TASK
In addition to ongoing hosting and support, the FindLaw team also needed help with the thousands of client sites that would need to be migrated from their proprietary platform over to WordPress. Instead of bogging down internal resources for this large and daunting task, FindLaw enlisted the support of digital agency Modern Tribe, migration agency Fantasktic, and web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare, alongside WP Engine, which helped bring all of these partners together.
By combining best-in-class technology and world-class partnerships, FindLaw was able to plan out and execute a migration process that preserved their legacy work, and allowed them to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation and scale within their industry.
DIVIDING AND CONQUERING FOR A BETTER END RESULT
In addition to successfully porting over existing content, the FindLaw team’s overarching goal for the migration was to gain the ability to provide faster performance for their end-users as well as additional infrastructure capacity to drive down costs by only paying for the resources they were using.
However, with hundreds of users requiring specific privileges in the WordPress backend, FindLaw’s combination of users, permissions, and integrations was immediately extremely complex.
Working with their dedicated customer success team at WP Engine to help integrate the right technologies for the job, the team at FindLaw looked to Modern Tribe for efficient implementation of subsites in WordPress’ multisite, Fantasktic for a seamless migration process, and Cloudflare for ongoing uptime and security optimizations after the migration was complete.
The Results
WP ENGINE: AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE FINDLAW TEAM
Throughout the migration process, WP Engine served as an extension of the FindLaw team. As a customer with WP Engine’s Premium Plus service level, FindLaw has a dedicated account team which includes a named Customer Success Manager (CSM), Technical Success Manager (TSM), and Account Manager who are all intimately familiar with the company’s needs. In addition, with Premium Plus service, FindLaw also has priority access to the most senior members of WP Engine’s 24/7 Technical Support team.
“When we work with WP Engine, I don’t see people shying away from what seem like difficult problems,” explained Jesse Haraldson, Principal Software Architect at FindLaw.“
For example, we had a process problem that involved adding domains to WP Engine that already exists somewhere else in WP Engine. Other vendors told us that having two coexisting domains was a security issue, leaving us to try and cultivate a new solution. Our Technical Success Manager at WP Engine worked out a process with our team and the FindLaw tech services group, that ended up solving the issue.”
“It’s nice to work with a provider that offers more than just products and services,” he added.”WP Engine acts as a collaborative and highly knowledgeable team member.”
For an organization running enterprise-scale operations, the benefits of Premium Plus plan on WP Engine aren’t just a nice-to-have, they are a requisite for success online.
DEDICATED TECHNICAL SUCCESS MANAGER AND CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGER
Large scale organizations often find their internal teams are working on highly technical issues while struggling to maintain the cadence of a successful company. At WP Engine, the job of the Technical Success Manager (TSM) and Customer Success Manager (CSM) is to act as an extension of your business, allowing those same internal teams to focus on digital innovation and business results rather than site management, maintenance, and performance capabilities.
Having access to these dedicated team members is a powerful tool for companies using mission-critical, revenue-driving applications and/or organizations in a position of rapid growth, looking to increase their market share, or optimize their platform and infrastructure for significant future events and launches.
Dedicated TSMs have a deep understanding of the technical configurations on each of their customers’ sites, including integrations, customizations, and tailored optimizations. They also help perform regular performance health analyses, recommend performance optimizations, and consult with customers’ internal teams on best practices for how they build, manage, and deploy sites with WP Engine.
For FindLaw, working with their dedicated TSM also allowed them to assemble a specialized team of digital agencies and security experts that was geared specifically towards their unique migration goals. As FindLaw continues to grow and add new clusters on their server, their dedicated TSM runs technical health checks, checking that things like caching, security, and customizations are working appropriately.
The dedicated CSM complements their TSM counterpart by creating alignment and understanding around the customer’s business goals and objectives. With FindLaw, the CSM drove communication with the customer and their agency to assess the overall satisfaction of the current solution and partnered with the TSM to test, validate and implement an alternative solution. The CSM also worked with the account team to outline a strategy which would allow for seamless scaling with FindLaw’s growth projections. Through recurring touch points, the CS team worked with FindLaw and their agency to track milestones, proactively address concerns/questions and provide insight on best practices, in particular around their multisite environment.
The dedicated CSM and TSM work together to ensure that customers achieve their business goals and objectives, understand best practices and optimization opportunities, and ultimately get the most value out of the Premium Plus plan. Additionally, the CSM and TSM operate as an internal advocate for the customer within WP Engine, representing their needs for added capabilities within the WP Engine platform and new features for improving WP Engine products. For FindLaw, this dedicated account team was instrumental in achieving key objectives around their proof of concept, third party agency solution build out, the migration of existing customers, and the rollout of new customers.
A smarter way to WordPress hosting.
What will you build? Get started today with WP Engine.