While that message resonated with their core audience of small to medium-sized businesses, the agency quickly realized their hosting was holding back their own evolution.
The agency sells hosting, website maintenance, and security packages to clients. While they weren’t having any particular problems with their previous hosting provider, they weren’t exactly impressed with the service they were getting either — it was slow, frustrating, and difficult to optimize.
So when COO Eric Dunn heard through word of mouth that there was a new Docker-powered hosting service in town offering true managed WordPress hosting, he jumped at the opportunity to try a solution that provided faster page speeds and better value for money.
After joining Convesio’s beta program and migrating all his client sites, Dunn says everything just worked, providing unmatched speed, security, and scalability for his clients.
What more could you want from a hosting provider? Here’s how Convesio and helped Evolve Marketing evolve and achieve better results, and how you can too.
About Evolve Marketing
Evolve Marketing is a full-service inbound marketing agency delivering data-driven results for small and medium-sized businesses. After years of working as a collective of small agency partners, the group formed one company this year to align their mission and vision for clients.
The agency specializes in helping clients implement the four pillars of inbound marketing methodology: attract, convert, close, delight. To help clients attract more qualified visitors, convert them into leads, and close more customers, Evolve Marketing’s team brings together experts in content, SEO, web design, app development, CRMs, and more.
The challenge: speed and performance
As a digital agency, one of Evolve Marketing’s core services is website design and development. WordPress is their content management system of choice, and not just because it powers 34.5% of all websites. WordPress is considered the best platform for SEO, giving businesses a head start when it comes to attracting visitors to their web presence.
“We typically work with clients using WordPress. One of our primary reasons why is the ease of implementing and maintaining SEO using WordPress,” Dunn says.
The agency offers hosting, website maintenance, and security packages to clients whose sites they build. It’s an agency model that makes sense — businesses need these ongoing services to ensure their sites continue to run smoothly and are able to deal with the constantly changing online world.
Over the years, the agency used shared hosting providers to host client sites, which Dunn says worked okay and was cost-effective, but they were limited in the performance optimizations they could apply to client sites. In other words, they quickly reached a ceiling for how fast they could make their client sites.
“We could never really push page speed optimization past where we wanted it,” he says. “We had no huge problems with our previous hosting providers, but we really needed hosting that could be more reliable and faster.”
The solution: server-level caching and pay-as-you-go pricing
Dunn heard about Convesio through word of mouth and it didn’t take much convincing for him to join the beta program. Specifically, he was attracted to the promise of fast speeds and reasonable, pay-as-you-go pricing.
“They mentioned that there was a new managed platform taking WP Engine head-on, but with a better technology at a quarter of the price,” he says.
“But the appeal was working with a containerized hosting platform that could provide the reliability, security, speed, and scalability that we needed and is critical for website growth.”
We quickly and seamlessly migrated the agency’s 13 websites across to the Convesio platform, including the Evolve Marketing website. Dunn noticed an immediate improvement in page speeds across his client sites.
Thanks to Convesio’s built-in, server-level caching, there’s no need to install performance optimizations plugins — customers get a big boost in speed from the get-go.
Convesio’s powerful WordPress dashboard allows Dunn and his team to easily view sites stats, requests, container performance, enabled features, and specific pages errors for each of their clients’ sites.
What’s more, Evolve Marketing has benefited from Convesio’s high availability, ensuring client sites are always online and ready to scale at a moment’s notice when unexpected traffic spikes hit. The agency has also been able to remove all security plugins from client sites because Convesio provides built-in, server-level security.
