Industry: Entertainment
Site: https://www.xtremexperience.com
Challenge: WordPress sites experiencing low conversion rates despite ad campaigns.
Solution: Launch Digital Marketing migrated selected sites to WP Engine's enterprise WordPress platform.
Results: Migrated sites saw better mobile and desktop performance resulting in improved conversion rate.
Dedicated to letting customers experience the adrenaline and allure of the world’s finest automobiles, Xtreme Xperience provides a safe, hands-on approach for drivers who want to experience the thrill of exclusive cars. Xtreme Xperience’s dynamic website faces heavy traffic during seasonal months; customers often purchase the experience as a gift for friends or family.
Unequipped with the infrastructure to handle large surges in traffic, Xtreme Xperience’s site suffered downtime and performance issues. Determined to solve the performance issues and avoid downtime at the next big seasonal holiday (Black Friday, 2017), the LDM team focused on Xtreme Xperience, testing performance optimizations and partnering with Google and WP Engine to track and tweak the results. Knowing that a performant website yields improved user experience and, in turn, higher conversion rates - and armed with data about an increasingly mobile Xtreme Xperience audience - LDM, WP Engine and Google focused on reducing load times while maintaining a rich mobile experience.
Our visitors spend a lot of time on the site clicking around researching and booking their once-in-a-lifetime experiences, so we engaged Launch Digital Marketing and WP Engine to ensure a fast, reliable and pleasant user experience.
—–Joe Moore, CMO & Co-Founder, Xtreme Xperience
THE CHALLENGE
Eli Romberg, Strategic Business Development Manager at Google helps companies attract more customers by building brand awareness and growing online sales through Adword campaigns. He was at a stand still when he realized certain WordPress sites utilizing Adwords weren’t experiencing the anticipated online conversions via their ad campaigns. Upon further investigation, he realized this was resulting from slow load times and performance issues on sites post click.
To further investigate and help remedy the issue, Romberg reached out to Launch Digital Marketing, a digital marketing agency dedicated to helping their clients push the limits of digital. Launch Digital Marketing, who develops their sites on the WordPress platform, worked with Google to identify sites that could benefit from better conversions using Adwords.
Romberg noted that performance issues were hindering optimality, “When measuring site performance (i.e duration of time necessary for the website to load), particularly on mobile devices, Launch Digital Marketing sites loaded at speeds below optimal.”
THE SOLUTION
To begin to understand the reasoning for the performance issues experienced by Launch Digital Marketing’s WordPress sites, Romberg collaborated with WP Engine. “I was told that WP Engine’s platform was a high performant solution within the WordPress ecosystem and was capable of driving meaningful performance improvements to websites.”
As a WordPress-centric digital marketing agency, Launch Digital Marketing works with hundreds of WordPress sites that could benefit from better performance and usability. Their typical client varies; pizza franchises, packaging companies, and fitness apps all rely on Launch Digital to facilitate noteworthy and secure digital experiences for their customers. However, Launch Digital was using alternative hosting companies resulting in subpar performance for many WordPress sites.
Among their client base, Launch Digital Marketing selected 10 WordPress sites that could benefit from better performance. The sites were migrated to the WP Engine platform and analyzed for both desktop and mobile performance. To ensure that the results were due solely to migration, no other modifications or improvements were made to the sites.
The Results
The experiment provided evidence that the optimization process involved in migration to WP Engine results in better performance on both desktop and mobile platforms. Sites analyzed for before and after performance showed an average of 36% improvement in desktop performance and 10% improvement in mobile performance. These extraordinary results prompted Launch Digital to officially migrate all of the 10 sites to WP Engine. Today, because of continued success, LDM has migrated 161 sites to the WP Engine's platform.
In migration to WP Engine, accompanied by many much needed site adjustments, including a migration to PHP 7, WP Engine caching and CDN activation, Xtreme Xperience improved their site performance overall and maintained optimal uptime during periods of peak traffic. This improved performance has facilitated a superb user experience resulting in a more than 400% improvement in conversion rate.
