Faster Speed to Market for a Family of Enterprise Brands
WP Engine Agency Partner Digital Yalo migrates B&G Foods to WordPress for greater agility and the freedom to create at scale.
Industry: Packaged Foods
Site: bgfoods.com | digitalyalo.com
Challenge: Standardize disparate brand sites on a single enterprise WordPress platform for faster speed to market. Complete migration and relaunch within a four-month deadline.
Solution: Joint go-to-market for an enterprise client. Digital Yalo migrated B&G Foods to a WordPress Multisite architecture via WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform.
Leveraging a dedicated technical and customer success account team at WP Engine, Digital Yalo has connected B&G Foods’ internal teams with direct support from WordPress experts to drive smooth digital experiences across each branded domain.
Results: Rapid migration of 40+ websites from legacy systems (including a custom Laravel CMS and other CMSs); Brand content agility, and the ability to launch new products more quickly.
Working with Digital Yalo and WP Engine, B&G Foods continues to reap the benefits of a successful WordPress standardization project, reducing the need for troubleshooting while refocusing development resources on improvements and innovation.
Since relaunching its sites, B&G Foods has pushed an additional 10 brands live, with consistent uptime and a lower bounce rate than ever before.
B&G Foods, Inc (NYSE: BGS) and its subsidiaries manufacture, sell, and distribute high-quality, branded shelf-stable and frozen foods across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Based in Parsippany, New Jersey, B&G Foods’ diverse portfolio includes more than 50 brands you know and love, such as Back to Nature, Cream of Wheat, Crisco, Dash, Green Giant, Las Palmas, New York Style, Ortega, Spice Islands, Victoria, and many more.
Digital Yalo is a full-service creative agency specializing in bringing out the soul of brands for the past 10 years. Their team of strategists, creatives, technologists, and account executives develop innovative marketing and advertising solutions for clients and their customers across a variety of traditional and new media formats and platforms. Yalo is based in Atlanta, GA, and Cleveland, OH, with outposts in multiple cities across the U.S.
“We were able to get everything done within the four-month timeline. This was a great combination of our skillset with WP Engine’s enterprise performance and technology to bring about an exceptional outcome for our client.”
—Arnold Huffman, CEO, Digital Yalo
A Unified Front for Enterprise Agility
With a portfolio of brands that includes beloved household names found in kitchens across America (and beyond), B&G Foods represents a model of growth and resilience in the food service industry.
Despite headwinds from ongoing pandemic constraints and rising costs within its specific sector, the enterprise family of brands has continued to evolve, meeting customers’ at-home preferences head-on while expanding the products offered under its umbrella.
A key factor behind this growth has been the ability of B&G Foods and its associated brands to move as one, pushing through headwinds with a unified digital footprint that combines once-disparate brand sites into a single, open source solution.
Previously, those sites represented a mounting list of different systems and proprietary software, all of which increasingly hindered agility and slowed time to market.
With various platforms and complex technologies taking up precious developer resources, challenges became inherent in everything from launching new brands to making changes on existing sites.
In an effort to streamline and rebuild its digital presence in a way that offered the best experience for external and internal users, B&G Foods decided to rebuild and migrate its 40+ sites to a central, WordPress-based brand hub.
“We landed on WordPress because we needed something that would not only unify all of our brands in a single, easy-to-use environment, we needed something that would enable creative agility and allow our content creators to more quickly build and launch amazing online experiences,” said B&G Foods Director of IT Operations and Infrastructure, Robert Sissick.
For help with the project, B&G Foods approached Digital Yalo, a full-service agency and WP Engine Strategic Agency Partner, with a four-month deadline to migrate, standardize, and push everything live.
“There was a lot of work to do,” said Brandon Jones, who oversees the Yalo Development team at Digital Yalo.
“But with WP Engine supporting us on the technical side, our team was able to stay laser-focused on the design and implementation of the project, enabling us to make immediate progress.”
WordPress Expertise Meets Agency Partnership
Digital Yalo began by assessing the project and planning out all needed elements, from discovery and ideation to the final phases of launch.
“We believe that great user experiences only happen when they’re an integral part of the creation process,” Jones said.
“It’s not something you can add in later, but something you need to have in mind while you build. So like any project of this size and scope, we looked at everything from UX design and web development to SEO and ongoing site maintenance through the lens of great user experience.”
Leveraging its integrated partnership with WP Engine, the Digital Yalo team was able to focus on all of the above while handing off critical aspects of the project, including:
- Cross-platform enterprise performance and security, including scalability, managed WAF, and DDoS mitigation, all backed by a network of global data centers.
- Ongoing technical and account partnership with a dedicated WP Engine Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Technical Success Manager (TSM).
Additional technical support provided both Digital Yalo and B&G Foods with a 24x7 point of contact to assist with any issues or troubleshooting that arose throughout the project—from migration to relaunch and beyond.
“The great service that WP Engine provides to its agency partners means we can better serve our clients,” Jones said.
“For this project specifically, we were able to handle a relatively large number of sites that needed to be migrated over, and in some cases fully rebuilt, and know that everything was taken care of once they got to their new home.”
In addition to the overall migration and relaunch, Digital Yalo also worked with WP Engine on SEO improvements and PHP upgrades, which led to better search rankings and a more seamless user experience for all of B&G Foods’ associated brands.
“And we were able to get everything done within the four-month timeline,” said Digital Yalo CEO, Arnold Huffman. “This was a great combination of our skillset with WP Engine’s enterprise performance and technology to bring about an exceptional outcome for our client.”
The Results
With a smooth migration and relaunch completed, the new website has surpassed initial project goals and enhanced the relationship between Digital Yalo and B&G Foods.
Faster speed to market was immediately apparent for B&G’s internal teams, who have found it easier to make changes, create new brand pages, and push them live faster using the new, unified WordPress install.
Additionally, post-migration performance issues have been kept at bay. All subdomains across the multisite network consistently run smoothly, with healthy metrics across the board and a 5% decrease in bounce rate across B&G’s top 10 websites.
“We’ve seen the same level of performance— if not better—than with the previous CMS,” Jones said of the new B&G Foods site, “plus there’s direct access to the folks who can fix things and get them back up and running if the client ever needs it.”
This has helped the Digital Yalo team make significant headway on backlogged support tickets, of which the agency closed more than 300, in 2021 alone.
In turn, less time spent on maintenance has freed up both Digital Yalo and B&G’s internal teams to focus on site improvements and innovation instead of reactive patching.
Most importantly, B&G was able to realize a 48% decrease in overall support and maintenance costs over a three-year period.
The positive outcome has not only benefited B&G Foods, it’s also provided proof of value for Digital Yalo that has helped enhance an important enterprise client relationship.
Based on the success of the initial project, Digital Yalo is expanding into more sites for B&G Foods, including more than a half-dozen net new sites that have been launched post-migration.
“Using the WordPress multisite architecture and WP Engine’s platform to power it all, we’re able to design and launch sites at an eight-to-10-week clip,” said Jones.
Going forward, Jones explained, the focus with B&G is based on budget, not time or ability, as the body of work Digital Yalo has already delivered speaks for itself.
”It’s much easier to quote out the budget when we know what the dev lift will be,” he said.
“Our success with the first project opened up a lot of other brands and opportunities within B&G, allowing us to expand our efforts across the enterprise footprint.”