Industry: Agency
Site: digitalremedy.com
Challenge: Improve site performance for publishers, advertisers and influencers.
Solution: Smooth migration to WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform for better performance and support.
Results: Better performance and support, faster-than-ever page load times, higher engagement and conversion rates.
Digital Remedy is a digital media solutions company leading the tech enabled marketing space. Unprecedented access delivers performance-based innovation and maximizes your business potential through superior customer service, diverse strategic solution sets, and flawless execution. Digital Remedy enables publishers, advertisers, and influencers to access the full potential of their digital assets.
WP Engine’s background, their reputation and just the whole package that was offered was better than the others. I’m glad we made the transition.
—–Tony Pascal, VP of Engineering
The Challenge
Digital Remedy is a New York City-based digital agency that enables publishers, advertisers and influencers to realize the full potential of their digital experiences. The agency helps provide users with compelling content and trending articles, and makes sure audiences are engaged and generally pleased with their on-site experiences. But time, and particularly the amount of time it takes certain pages to load, can make or break those experiences in a matter of seconds.
“If it takes 10 seconds for our site to load, then it’s not a good experience,” said Tony Pascal, VP of Engineering at Digital Remedy. “Visitors will end up leaving, and we miss out on that opportunity.”
It’s not just an opportunity that gets lost, either. When it comes to providing optimal digital experiences, time is also, quite literally, money.
“The first second of delay in page load time can mean 50 percent of your traffic is lost,” said Tiffany Coletti Kaiser, Digital Remedy’s EVP of Marketing and Client Services. “If a million people visit your site, and it takes one second to load, you’re going to lose half a million people. That’s advertising dollars, partner dollars and content dollars just flushed down the toilet.”
Because Digital Remedy’s business is built on the ability to monetize an ecosystem of influencers and websites, page performance is particularly vital. “For advertisers, if our pages aren’t loading, we can’t guarantee an impression,” Kaiser said. “As it relates to content, if we’re passing content through our influencer network, driving that traffic back to our sites, an influencer isn’t going to want to post content that doesn’t load. They’re not very happy if they’re driving their fans, their audience, their user base to a webpage that isn’t loading.”
Digital Remedy also appears on seven major advertisement exchanges to sell inventory on their sites. If their websites are performing poorly when advertisers visit, they don’t get the job.
With performance core to all of their partners and clients, Digital Remedy reached a point where it needed to make the move to a more robust platform. Additionally, the customer service and support they were receiving from their previous provider was lacking.
“A lot of the reasons we switched had to do with the level of customer service we were getting, or rather, not getting,” Pascal said. “We experienced different technical issues with our previous platform. They also had us upgrade to a new level of architecture, which was pretty painful to do—and we didn’t see much benefit out of it after the fact.”
The Solution
Pascal and Kaiser solicited proposals from a number of vendors and platforms, but ultimately decided to go with WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform in an effort to tackle their performance and customer service needs.
“WP Engine’s background, their reputation and just the whole package that was offered was better than the others,” Pascal said. “I’m glad we made the transition.”
Once the choice was made, it was time for the migration from Digital Remedy’s old provider to WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform. Due to the rocky experiences they had endured with their previous provider, the Digital Remedy team was understandably anxious about migrating.
“We knew that all transitions, all migrations, have hiccups and areas of concerns,” Kaiser said. “Migrations for us are really important. We’ve got a lot of things to migrate, from email lists to excel lists, all with multiple stakeholders with various influence and requirements.”
“Additionally, there were things that needed to be archived and things that didn’t need to be archived,” Kaiser said. “It’s a pretty massive infrastructure for any organization, and migrating it was a big concern not only for our CEO but our entire executive team.”
Nonetheless, Kaiser said she and her team were comfortable with the level of support and communication they were getting from their WP Engine team, which helped mitigate much of their unease.
“It really solidified our confidence and helped us say, ‘yes’ to the migration,” she said. “We probably would have just stayed with the unfortunate customer service at our previous provider even longer if we hadn’t been comfortable with WP Engine, simply because migrations can be such a headache.”
In the end, the migration was successful, and the Digital Remedy team was pleased with the responsiveness of their WP Engine cohorts. “We hit some snags here and there with the migration, but working through them with the onboarding engineer, was easy.” Pascal said.
After the migration, the Digital Remedy team immediately started seeing results in overall site performance. This was a relief, given the paramount importance site performance holds for their company.
“We’ve done a lot of research on page loads,” Kaiser said. “While it’s incredibly important for content, for verification of site, eliminating fraud and staying above board, faster load time also keeps people on the site longer.”
The Results
Now that the site is loading faster, the Digital Remedy team has seen an increase in page conversions from one page to the next, and one section to the next. Once again, time in this realm is quite literally money.
“These conversions allow us more opportunities to monetize that user and the audience,” Kaiser said. “It allows us more opportunities to provide unique content, because the revenue is there for us to support more content. It allows us more opportunity to bring in clients that are interested in the audiences that we’re building and curating, solely based on the page load time. It’s extremely important and very valuable.”
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