Brewing Up Web Success With HonestBrew

Craft beer lovers have a refined palate. They demand a lot from their beer, and they want the buying experience to be just as good. We recently caught up with WP Engine customer and craft beer evangelist Andrew Reeve, CEO and Co-Founder of HonestBrew, to hear more about his business and his WP Engine story.

Hi Andrew, thanks for taking the time out to talk to us today. Can you start with a quick introduction to yourself and your company?

Hi, thanks for having me. I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of HonestBrew, an online platform where people can buy the best craft beers from around the world and have them delivered to their door. We launched the company three years ago and I’ve been leading the company through its initial growth stage.

My main goal is to make craft beer more accessible in the UK. It is something I’ve enjoyed for many years and want to share with more people. With so many passionate brewers producing interesting beers, it’s our role to get them into the hands of people in the UK.

Can you tell us about your journey with us here at WP Engine?

We started working with WP Engine 18 months ago to launch our website to the public. Before then, when it was under development, it was run on a shared environment by a UK host that was not production ready. As any ecommerce business knows, a slow website is detrimental to customer satisfaction and conversion rates. We didn’t get what we needed from our website before and we knew that it needed vast improvements before it was ready to be customer facing.

So, why us?

We did a lot of research before deciding on which WordPress hosting partner to go with. We first heard about WP Engine through bloggers – there are a number of great references online and so we decided to take a look at what you could do for us.

We whittled our choice down to three but WP Engine stood out for two main reasons. The platform is extremely reliable and provides daily back-ups, direct updates and it continually screens for potential problems in the background.

The scalability of the platform was also a unique selling point. We started small but wanted to work with a partner that could handle more traffic and support the complexity that comes with our ambitious ecommerce website. This has become even more important recently as we have secured over £400,000 in funding from a Crowdcube project which will allow us to take our business to the next level. We’re confident WP Engine will be able to support this next step in our growth journey.

And have we lived up to expectations?

Definitely, outsourcing server configuration to WP Engine as the experts has allowed us to focus on our own business objectives without having to worry about the website. In the last 18 months since working with you, we’ve had very little downtime. This is a big plus point for us.

The knowledge and experience of the live chat staff is great too. They understand our technical questions and the problems that we have. On almost all occasions, our queries are answered quickly and by the first person we speak to, saving us so much time.

And finally, would you recommend us to others in your industry?

For start-ups, WP Engine is a great partner. You can start small and scale-up as you grow which is important for any small business. The service infrastructure works behind the scenes which means we can focus all our attention on what we love doing – selling craft beer.

Want to read more stories from WP Engine customers? Each weekday in November we’ll unveil a new customer story as part of our WP Engine Customer Spotlight series.