MANAGED WORDPRESS
Serving Up a Seamless
Digital Experience
Digital agency Workhorse combines the right ingredients for success, crafting a
fresh new website for a growing restaurant chain.
Site:
Industry:
Restaurant & Hospitality
"WP Engine’s platform provided everything we needed to bring Costa Vida’s vision to life—speed, security, and seamless scalability. Their dev tools made the build efficient, and their support team was fantastic throughout the process.”
—Thomas Bacon, Chief Technology Officer, Workhorse
100%
Core Web Vitals pass rate
70%
Boost in "near me" local search performance
33%
Increase in total users
The Client
Costa Vida brings the vibrant flavors of the Mexican coast to over 100 locations across the United States, serving fresh, made-from-scratch cuisine that captures the spirit of an inspired lifestyle. With the mission "to eat inspired is to live inspired," Costa Vida delivers fresh Mexican cuisine crafted daily, creating a dining experience that keeps customers coming back.
Workhorse is a digital agency specializing in high-performance web solutions that drive growth and meaningful impact. A WP Engine agency partner, Workhorse partners with mid-size and enterprise clients to transform ideas into progress, combining modern expertise with focused effort. Fueled by creativity, innovation, and a passion for excellence, the agency’s team of developers, designers, and digital strategists craft tailored, results-driven web experiences that empower businesses to accomplish more.
The Challenge
Build a high-performance, scalable digital experience for a growing franchise business. As Costa Vida expanded, the company needed a digital platform that could support individual store locations, integrate seamlessly with its ordering system, and drive in-store visits and digital engagement. Improving site performance, SEO, and operational efficiency were all key priorities.
The Solution
To build a fast, scalable website with seamless local integration, Workhorse rebuilt Costa Vida’s digital presence—migrating from Craft CMS and a DIY hosting setup on AWS to WordPress via WP Engine’s fully managed platform. By integrating Yext for real-time location data and Yoast Local SEO for enhanced search visibility, the new site delivers a frictionless user experience, supporting automated location updates, mobile-friendly online ordering, and fast, secure browsing across all devices.
The Results
Costa Vida’s new website isn’t just a visual refresh—it’s a performance-driven digital experience that enhances customer engagement, streamlines operations and supports continued growth.
With fast load times and SEO-optimized performance, the new site passes all Core Web Vitals, ensuring a frictionless experience for visitors. Combined with improved local search visibility, this has led to a 70% increase in “near me” search performance, making it easier for customers to find locations and drive in-store visits.
These enhancements have translated into a 33% increase in total users, as more visitors engage with the site’s intuitive navigation and seamless ordering experience. Supporting more than 100+ locations across the U.S. and Canada, the site’s automated updates eliminate manual work for franchise owners, keeping store hours, addresses, and availability accurate in real-time.
With a stronger digital presence, Costa Vida now attracts over 3 million website visitors annually, strengthening its connection with both new and returning customers. More importantly, the optimized eCommerce experience has driven $14.8 million in annual revenue, as customers take advantage of skip-the-line ordering, rewards sign-ups, and mobile-friendly transactions.
The new site also received the Gold Award in the Restaurant category at the 2024 Davey Awards, recognizing its outstanding design and functionality and highlighting Workhorse's commitment to creating customized user-focused digital experiences with high impact.
Seamless location management and SEO
Managing location data and search visibility is crucial for a multi-location restaurant brand like Costa Vida. To ensure accurate, up-to-date store information and improve discoverability, Workhorse, together with its partners at Unfettered and The Graphic Standard, integrated the new WordPress build with Yext and Yoast Local SEO to create a dynamic, scalable location management system.
Yext serves as the single source of truth, automatically syncing location data in real time with zero manual intervention, while Yoast Local SEO generates rich schema markup to enhance search visibility and discoverability. New locations are added programmatically, streamlining operations and ensuring seamless scalability.
By automating these processes, Costa Vida’s site now ensures that customers always have access to the latest location details, while franchise owners save valuable time on manual updates.
Security, performance, and reliability
The new Costa Vida site also delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability, ensuring a seamless experience for customers and administrators alike.
With WP Engine’s Global Edge Security, the site is protected by a managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) with real-time threat updates, advanced DDoS protection via Cloudflare’s Anycast network, and end-to-end encryption with HTTP/3 for enhanced security. A global CDN also ensures fast, seamless performance across all devices.
Beyond security, WP Engine’s fully managed infrastructure ensures high uptime, automatic updates, and enterprise-grade reliability, allowing Costa Vida’s digital presence to scale confidently alongside its business growth.
A winning partnership
Bringing Costa Vida’s vision to life required both technical expertise and a platform built for performance.
To leverage both, the Workhorse team leaned on WP Engine’s developer-friendly toolset, expert support, and enterprise-grade hosting to build a fast, scalable, and secure digital experience.
“WP Engine’s platform provided everything we needed to bring Costa Vida’s vision to life—speed, security, and seamless scalability. Their dev tools made the build efficient, and their support team was fantastic throughout the process,” said Workhorse [Title] [Name].
“From onboarding to launch, we had confidence that Costa Vida’s new digital experience was backed by industry-leading performance and security.”
With a high-performance, scalable foundation, Costa Vida’s website is now easier to use for both customers and content managers, more optimized for SEO, and fully equipped to support future growth.
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