Building a Website With More Than Meets the Eye
Tobii Gaming relies on WP Engine for speed, scale, and an agile website that can help grow its customer base
Industry: Eyetracking Technology, PC Gaming
Site: gaming.tobii.com
Challenge: Tobii Gaming needed an agile platform for a site relaunch that was integrated across the company’s existing martech stack and optimized for speed and scale.
Solution: WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform.
Results: Tobii’s new website experiences faster-than-ever page load times, higher conversion rates, and zero downtime, resulting in an overall better user experience.
Tobii Gaming is a Stockholm, Sweden-based software and hardware company that creates eye-tracking software and hardware for PC gaming and VR. Founded in 2001, the Tobii Group consists of three business units: Tobii Dynavox from an acquisition of US-based DynaVox, Tobii Pro, and Tobii Tech, which oversees the gaming division. Tobii became publicly traded in 2015, trading on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The company has offices in the U.S., Japan, China, Germany, Norway, and Ukraine.
“We’ve never had a delay or an issue when we’ve needed to contact WP Engine, and the user interface is easy-to-use, so we can often manage a lot of troubleshooting on our own.”
—Metin Uçar, Lead Front-End Developer, Tobii
The Challenge
Tobii Gaming is a branch of Tobii Technology—a Stockholm-based company that sells products for eye control and eye-tracking. Tobii’s gaming division provides hardware and software solutions for e-sports, PC games, and live-streaming on Twitch. It also boasts partnerships with some of the world’s hottest gaming companies: Ubisoft, Square-Enix, Alienware, and Acer Predator, just to name a few.
Their product line is equally impressive. From peripheral eye-tracking devices that can be used with existing PC gaming platforms to high-performance gaming devices with eye-tracking technology already built-in, all of their products create interactions based on users’ eye movement.
While its products speak for themselves, Tobii’s website has the challenge of selling its cutting-edge technology without offering direct access to its core products.
“Our website is an important piece of real estate,” said John Tan, Tobii Gaming’s Head of Growth. “But it’s not the place where our customers get the core value out of eye-tracking.”
Instead, he explained, the website is a hub for promoting awareness about their products and creating additional interactions for their customers.
For example, when users are logged into Tobii’s website, they are offered various incentives such as game keys that allow them to unlock different features they might not be able to find on their own. “In short, the website creates various touchpoints that drive people back to the core product itself,” Tan said.
But making sure those touchpoints work means understanding how the various interactions take place, and to do so, Tobii employs a robust martech stack that includes analytics reporting, A/B testing tools, and heat mapping to gain a holistic view of the entire customer journey.
With a new website that was experiencing high traffic demand (half a million views every month) and data coming in that was giving them a better view of how to convert that traffic, Tobii’s challenge was twofold: keep up with their rapid growth while building a new website that was integrated with their martech stack and optimized for conversions.
The Solution
Using WP Engine’s platform, Tobii was able to build its new website with customers as the primary focus.
Based on analytics, the Tobii team knew slower page load times were preventing site visitors from converting more often, so they made sure the new site specifically addressed this.
“We focused on creating better conversions by introducing more features, a better user experience, and faster page load time,” said Tobii’s Lead Front-End Developer, Metin Uçar and Siavash Moghaddam, Tobii’s Product Owner for Martech.
“We knew these things would definitely help drive better conversions and retention on the site.”
Keeping the site up and running regardless of the level of traffic coming in, added Juha Silventoinen, Tobii’s Head of UX/Brand, was another major factor, as was WP Engine’s support and user-friendly platform.
“We’ve never had a delay or an issue when we’ve needed to contact WP Engine,” Uçar said.
“The user interface is easy-to-use, so we can often manage a lot of troubleshooting on our own.”
With WP Engine at their side, Tobii was able to successfully relaunch their site without any downtime or other major hiccups.
The results since the new site has gone live have been just what the team was looking for.
The Results
With the relaunch, the front end of Tobii’s site has been almost completely redone.
While the team is continuing to work on certain areas, their overall page speed has improved by more than 5x across most of their pages.
“Also, our purchasing flow has improved,” Tan said.
“We’re now seeing customers make purchases with fewer clicks, and we were able to begin using a new payment provider (Stripe), which is also making the process much easier.”
Tobii has also seen an improvement in its development workflow as well as a new onboarding experience for users who download their software.
Overall, the Tobii team said they were exceedingly happy with the outcome of the new site, and planned on using WP Engine to help with additional projects in the future.
“With this release, we’ve solved two years of technical debt,” Tan said.
“We couldn’t have done any of it without the help of WP Engine. When we continue building new sites— such as one we plan on doing soon for an upcoming VR eye-tracking site. WP Engine will definitely be our partner of choice.”