Forging a Path for Agency Growth
WordPress agency Monkey Vision helps clients navigate the jungle of the internet with WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform for incredible, highly performant sites.
Industry: Digital Agency
Site: monkeyvision.nl
Challenge
Find a trusted WordPress partner for exponential growth. To meet growing demand and reduce strain on in-house resources, Monkey Vision needed a platform that offered best-in-class performance and a modern development workflow, including tools and automation to reduce time spent debugging sites.
Solution
Monkey Vision has migrated more than 150 client sites to WP Engine's enterprise WordPress hosting platform, providing immediate improvements across all environments, including faster page speeds and improved search engine rankings.
Results
Rapid agency growth and a 60% performance improvement across all sites. In less than two years, Monkey Vision has doubled its book of business, with more than 300 client sites now powered in partnership with WP Engine.
The agency’s design expertise combined with WP Engine’s industry-leading WordPress platform is a no-brainer for clients, and Monkey Vision’s developers have reclaimed and refocused valuable time previously spent maintaining and debugging sites.
Monkey Vision is a Nijmegen, Netherlands-based web design agency dedicated to building and maintaining beautiful websites. Since its launch in 2014, Monkey Vision has become one of the highest-rated agencies in the Netherlands, with plans to expand into other parts of Europe. A WP Engine Agency Partner, Monkey Vision builds sites exclusively on WordPress with a growing, full-time team of developers, designers, and digital marketing pros.
“I know a lot about WordPress, but WP Engine’s platform and incredible support go way beyond my expertise. Our strategic partnership is extremely important because together, we’re simply able to do better work.”
—Wouter Polman, Monkey Vision Owner & CEO
Too Many Platforms, Too Much Time
For the team at Monkey Vision, it’s all about creating and maintaining beautiful client sites.
Launched in 2014, Monkey Vision’s team of WordPress pros continue to excel at this goal, with more than 300 client sites now managed by the rapidly-growing agency.
For more than five years, that growth was powered with in-house server infrastructure (maintained by Monkey Vision staff) and a wide array of tools, platforms, and plugins the Monkey Vision team managed for different client sites.
While the DIY approach worked as the agency was getting off the ground, sustained growth also came with additional challenges, including the crucial moment when client sites needed to push live.
With server resources increasingly strained, moving complicated back-end environments from development to a live production site became a common struggle and it often resulted in endless hours of debugging, after a project was finished.
As their workload grew, time management also began to pose a problem for Monkey Vision’s developers, who found it increasingly difficult to take on new projects when much of their time was spent searching for errors on a site-by-site basis, every day.
To meet their goals for growth, the Monkey Vision team decided to revamp their strategy, find a trusted managed WordPress partner, and start building sites that were easier to manage, navigate, and update.
Managing the Jungle for Better Client Sites
Monkey Vision researched multiple hosting providers but were ultimately swayed by the clear advantages of WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform and Agency Partner Program.
The tools, scalability, and flexibility inherent in WP Engine’s enterprise offering provided solutions for everyday obstacles that plagued Monkey Vision’s team and inhibited their progress.
For starters, in-house server maintenance was no longer necessary. After migrating to a dedicated server managed by WP Engine, the Monkey Vision team was able to leave server optimizations and updates to someone else.
Additionally, the Monkey Vision team began using Smart Plugin Manager to quickly find and assess problems with plugins across their sites and schedule automatic updates to ensure site data was secure and properly managed.
Both solutions have greatly reduced the strain on in-house resources, allowing the Monkey Vision team to refocus on their core business.
As a Strategic Agency Partner, Monkey Vision also has access to top-tier agency resources, insights from other agency partners, and a dedicated support team they continue to leverage, ensuring every site they design is built for growth, agility, and security.
“You can buy hosting anywhere, but WP Engine is in a different league,” said Wouter Polman, Owner & CEO at Monkey Vision. ”When our expertise combines with the tooling, automation, and support WP Engine provides, we’re simply able to do better work and do more of it.”
The Results
With easy access to Dev/Stage/Prod environments, migrating sites to a live environment is now faster than ever, leaving the entire team at Monkey Vision with more time and resources for new client projects.
Once the sites are live, they also enjoy a boost in page-speed performance and higher search rankings, right out of the gates.
“We do a lot of migrations for our clients, and one of the biggest issues, always, is site speed,” Polman said.
“When new clients migrate to us, they always comment on how much faster their site is, and that’s before we even begin to optimize it!”
In fact, Monkey Vision has seen a 60% improvement in site speed across their client sites.
In addition to performance enhancements, Monkey Vision has also reduced the amount of developer time that was previously spent debugging sites, backing them up, and searching for plugin errors from multiple hours per week to a single check-in per day.
“We’ve reclaimed the equivalent of 10% of our developer hours that can now be refocused on building incredible websites,” Polman said.
“That alone has been a huge element behind our success, and even when we do have to engage, we can often fix many issues using WP Engine’s one-click backup capabilities.”
“We’re looking to expand into German and Belgian markets as we continue to grow,” he added, “and with WP Engine backing us up, I have no doubt we’ll be able to make it happen.”