Industry: Agency
Site: https://ebq.com/
Challenge: EBQ needed a way to decrease page load speeds to keep visitors on their website.
Solution: Moving their website to WP Engine, EBQ was able to dramatically improve page load speeds, and optimize their site for the modern client.
Results: Decrease in webpage load time from 20-40 seconds to 2-3 seconds.
Since 2006, EBQ has been a “one-stop” shop sales and marketing agency. They service every phase of the sales and marketing cycle, from start to finish. As experts in the industry, they have succeeded in helping their clients from areas such as entering new markets, identifying prospects, to closing deals and generating revenue.
The post migration experience has been great. Our page load speeds have been amazing. The same pages that were taking us 20-40 seconds are now taking 2-3 seconds to load. And, we made very little changes to them, if any at all. We were able to put back our Wistia video pages that were so clunky on our old platform. It just allowed us to go back to the kind of experience we wanted to provide.
—–Doug Phelps, Success Manager, EBQ
THE CHALLENGE
Since 2006, EBQuickstart (EBQ) has been a “one-stop shop” sales and marketing agency. EBQ services every phase of the sales and marketing cycle, from start to finish. However, it wasn’t always that way.
The marketing division began to grow significantly in 2015, when the agency realized their clients had a huge need for professional services and marketing assistance. “Our company had done lead generation, and by proxy did some augmented marketing services. The lead gen projects that our clients were running were very technical, and they didn’t have time to stop and build good marketing collateral,” said Doug Phelps, Success Manager for EBQ.
Building out their marketing efforts extended to the EBQ website. “We had a website, but it was on a really, really early version of WordPress. It was ugly, and all the colors were dark. It was like going into a cave when you visited. The site was hosted on a budget hosting service, and the page loads were just so darn slow. We finally put some tracking analytics on it, and we were getting up to 12 visitors per day, and they were all EBQ employees,” said Phelps.
“We started building out our website by adding more pages and richer content. The graphic elements started getting heavier. We were driving traffic through our SEO efforts, our pay per clicks, our mass emails, and Pardot, but we were having real problems with getting people to stay on the pages, due to dismal page load speeds. Sometimes we would run a benchmark test and see 20-40 seconds for a page to load. It takes a prospect out of their mindset, and they move on. It has to be instantaneous,” said Phelps.
In addition to extremely slow lead times, a consultant to EBQ removed the visual editor for the website to add an SEO layer tool, and didn’t let anyone know. “Thirty-two days later, when it became obvious, we couldn’t go back. All of the deleted items only had a 30 day window in the trash can, like most providers. All of those restorative pages were gone, and the visual editor was gone, so it froze our website. For three months, we couldn’t make a single change. We scrambled in the background to build another website, and pushed it up to bring it live, and we still had the same page speeds,” said Phelps.
“We were using several tools including Hotjar and Mo to find ways to see where people were going, what elements we could slim down the visual effects to make the page speeds faster. And, when we moved onto the newly re-built site, our provider’s support team missed a few steps. They knocked out one of our MX records, and we weren’t able to receive emails for the last two hours on a Friday afternoon at the end of the month. This really affected our sales team and their quota. We weren’t receiving emails coming back from prospects and clients, and they really started to ring the bell, wanting to know if everything was ok. That experience wasn’t very pleasant,” said Phelps.
THE SOLUTION
StrategiQ had previously moved their other clients over to WP Engine. “We moved a few clients over to WP Engine at first, and then we were so happy with the experience that we moved everyone over,” said Thompson.
EBQ knew they needed a managed WordPress platform to serve their clients and their growing business. “In the end, we realized that WP Engine was using EBQ to set appointments, and one of our VPs said, ‘Hey, why don’t we make an appointment with WP Engine.’ We did a discovery call, and our experience with WP Engine was so seamless,” said Phelps.
Following the call, EBQ made the move to WP Engine. “When we were getting ready to migrate to the site, we thought we were going to order pizza and sodas, and do it on a Friday afternoon after work closed. We planned to just have a slumber party for the marketing team until it got done. But, all we had to do was follow the one-click migration wizard tool. It literally took all the work out of our hands. And, we were done with the migration in three minutes. It was excellent, because we got our weekend back and WP Engine gave us complete confidence in the platform,” said Phelps.
After the seamless migration, the marketing team could focus on optimizing their site. “Google’s latest requirements for optimizations are really leading with mobile first. We created three different types of experiences. We have phone, tablet, and desktop versions of our our website that are triggered by screen size detected when someone visits the site,” said Phelps.
“Because we are B2B, the majority of traffic to our site comes from desktop. However, the emails that we are sending, and therefore the landing pages that culminate from those experiences, are coming in at 57% on iPhones, 30% on Android, and the remaining on desktop. It’s interesting that more people are reading their emails on their mobile phones, and making visits to our website when they are, but when they are doing their SEO searches, they’re using their desktop,” said Phelps.
“No matter the screen size though, what’s nice is that everything on WP Engine is designed and optimized for WordPress. I’ve built a couple of websites on the side for clients, and the experience of moving between what the themes controlled, what the variables were, and moving between the CMS and having to go into the hosting provider for certain portions of it was a mess. You had to keep two brains working at the same time. It was like a firewall in the experience. I don’t see this when I’m working in our website on WP Engine, which is great,” said Phelps.
The Results
“The post migration experience has been great. Our page load speeds have been amazing. The same pages that were taking us 20-40 seconds, are now taking 2-3 seconds to load. And, we made very little changes to them (if any at all). We were able to put back our Wistia video pages that were so clunky on our old platform. It just allowed us to go back to the kind of experience we wanted to provide,” said Phelps.
“I’m not saying our website can’t use any improvements, because all websites can use improvement over time.
We just haven’t had any problems. We haven’t even had to reach out for support from the WP Engine team. I’m so in love with the WP Engine brand,” said Phelps.
“Before WP Engine, we were bragging about all the things we had done, but we were the only ones seeing it. Then, we realized the value of moving your company forward. At the time, we had 20 employees, and we were doing $3 million in revenue. Now, we’ve grown up—we are 11 years old, we have 200+ employees, and we’ll probably hit $20 million in revenue this year that is all self-funded,” said Phelps.
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