Fueling Economic Development With a World-Class Website
WP Engine Agency Partner ExpandTheRoom helps Invest Puerto Rico relaunch
its digital presence with an inspirational, informative website built on WordPress.
Industry: Economic Development
Site: www.investpr.org by expandtheroom.com
Challenge: Lead digital transformation for Invest Puerto Rico as the organization adjusted to post-pandemic realities. Relaunch the InvestPR website with fresh design and performance improvements to enhance user experience and support the organization's marketing, communications, and lead generation goals.
Solution: Site migration from Webflow to a fast, secure WordPress site built on WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform. Custom UX design and flexible content management deliver Invest Puerto Rico’s messaging and resources more effectively.
Results: Improvements across key performance and engagement metrics, including a 22% decrease in average page load time, a 13.4% increase in session duration, and a staggering 167% increase in organic search traffic since the relaunch of Invest Puerto Rico’s website.
Invest Puerto Rico (InvestPR) is a public-private organization working to develop Puerto Rico into a world-class destination for business. InvestPR works closely with the Department of Economic Development and Commerce, government agencies, trade organizations, and others to encourage investment across Puerto Rico and help new companies establish a presence on the island.
ExpandTheRoom is a digital product development and marketing agency and a WP Engine Agency Partner. The agency’s approach to client success has created business-changing outcomes for well-established brands including Citibank, Warner Media, the National Hockey League, Royal Caribbean, Algorand, and more.
“Invest Puerto Rico brought us on to help build a site that tells the economic story of the island in a more engaging way. We chose to build the project on WP Engine’s platform because working with them goes well beyond hosting and allows our team to focus on site design and storytelling aspects knowing that site performance and security are already taken care of.”
—Joe Rosenthal, Head of Business Development for ExpandTheRoom
Sharing Economic Opportunities on a Global Scale
Invest Puerto Rico (InvestPR) was founded in 2019 to shine a light on Puerto Rico’s wide investment opportunities, including its talented bilingual workforce, robust tax incentives, vibrant culture, and all the benefits of U.S. law and copyright protection.
The organization has enjoyed broad success since its launch, and although InvestPR’s initial web presence was helpful while it was getting off the ground, the organization’s activities and marketing requirements quickly began to outpace the functionality and performance capabilities of its original website.
Specifically, InvestPR’s internal teams were experiencing issues with site load times and content flexibility on their Webflow site.
As they launched a rebranding effort meant to infuse the organization's initiatives with fresh inspiration, InvestPR also engaged WP Engine Agency Partner ExpandTheRoom for help rebuilding its website to ensure the new brand identity was coupled with improvements to site performance and speed.
Following economic development trends, investing resources into the organization’s web platform made sense, especially as InvestPR continues charging toward a digital future.
ExpandTheRoom’s competitive analysis of the global economic development landscape helped identify ways for InvestPR to distinguish its web presence. This information was then used to optimize the user experience and messaging in ways that would attract potential companies of interest from around the world.
Across the website, ExpandTheRoom also identified key areas of opportunity, including the need to streamline site content, build a visual identity that would align with InvestPR’s new branding, and optimize the site and its infrastructure for improved performance across key metrics.
From Proprietary SaaS to Open Source Flexibility
The plan centered around migrating InvestPR’s original site from Webflow and rebuilding it using WordPress on WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform.
“WordPress was a great fit for our content flexibility and security needs,” said InvestPR CMO Nicole Vilalte.
Because it’s open source and widely regarded as an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), Vilalte explained, WordPress also offered new opportunities for InvestPR in the form of integrations and customization.
“The beauty of building it on WP Engine’s platform is that they make it that much easier for us to get started while handling all the server-side requirements, WordPress optimizations, security, and support,” said Ryan Ogden, Director of Technology for ExpandTheRoom.
With the site rebuild underway, ExpandTheRoom’s development team integrated important third-party elements, including Salesforce, analytics tracking, and translation services that were crucial to InvestPR’s efforts around the globe.
Today, site content is available for consumption in English, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, with the potential to add more languages as needs arise.
“Creating global interest in Puerto Rico’s economic development was one of the main goals of this project, and WP Engine helped us deliver on that by providing us with a dedicated agency success team and a secure, scalable platform to build on,” said Ogden.
As InvestPR Chief Business Development Officer Michael Gay put it: “With our new site, all the important information being offered by Invest Puerto Rico is being served up quickly and securely with a user experience tailored specifically to our target audiences all over the world.”
The Results
Since the launch of their new site on WP Engine’s platform, InvestPR has seen tremendous improvements across many of its most important metrics.
Visibility has improved, and the new site has experienced a 167% increase in traffic from organic searches.
The visitors coming from those searches are also spending more time on the site than ever before.
Since the site was relaunched on WP Engine's platform, analysis of before/after metrics show a 13.4% increase in session duration, as visitors take in more information and dive deeper into InvestPR’s rich content and resources.
Page load times were some of the most important metrics under consideration during the rebuild, and the new site certainly delivered.
A 22% decrease in average page load time is allowing visitors all over the world to consume the site’s content more quickly. This decrease in load times has also contributed to a 6.5% decrease in the site’s overall bounce rate.
The performance improvements paired with the creative design and user experience enhancements led by ExpandTheRoom are helping InvestPR capture new leads, spur economic growth, and facilitate new opportunities for market-leading businesses looking across the globe for competitive advantage.
“WP Engine served as a true agency partner for this project and was a natural extension of the ExpandTheRoom team,” said ExpandTheRoom founder and CEO James Cole.
“That’s so important for us as we focus on the user experience and custom development needs. Having this level of support from a technical perspective makes our creative work that much easier.”