With clients relying on its non-recourse financial services during challenging times, Express Legal Funding’s website must be fast, reliable, and secure at all times. At any given time, customers may be looking for details on financial aid or want to apply online. Therefore, its website must be available 24/7/365.

In our conversation with Aaron Winston, the Strategy Director at Express Legal Funding, he shares how having a reliable Managed WordPress hosting service is essential for maintaining their clients’ trust. He also shared how they shifted from being overwhelmed by website maintenance to spending more time writing blog posts and growing their business.

Snapshot

• Industry: Pre-settlement funding
• Business size: 4 team members

The problem

Express Legal Funding previously hosted its site on Squarespace. In July 2020, Aaron shifted his focus to growing the company through SEO and content creation strategies. He realized Squarespace was not built for the top-tier level of SEO he sought to accomplish, so they needed to switch to WordPress. He then created his personal blog to improve his author E-E-A-T to aid in Express Legal Funding’s SEO efforts.

Initially, Aaron hosted his personal blog with InMotion Hosting. But it wasn’t the right choice for them. “I very quickly regretted going with  Inmotion Hosting over Kinsta. So many facets of the experience were very frustrating.”

Poor technical support and site security risk

Aaron then encountered a series of troubles with their previous hosting providers. Because they couldn’t rely on the support team of these providers, they often found themselves figuring things out on their own.

“Squarespace also significantly lacked support. On multiple occasions, it took between  24 to 48 hours to hear back, and even then, the help was minimal.”

“And then, with InMotion Hosting, my personal brand website was showing up as not secure on Google Chrome. There was a lot of back-and-forth that got me nowhere. Once they identified the issue, the solution they offered was not viable, in my opinion, as I wanted to maximize the speed and trustworthiness of my site.”

Wasted resources on complex site management

The lack of reliability made managing their website a bottleneck and a source of frustration for the team. They were forced to waste hours of work sorting out tech issues and optimizing site performance – time that could have been spent on client services, content creation, and business development.

“I would dread logging into Inmotion Hosting and attempting to make changes. The infrastructure, usability, and support felt very dated. It was a time drain. The dashboard was not intuitive, and the last straw that caused me to leave was when they informed me that the SSL certificate setup was incompatible with CloudFlare. It was the right move, even though I still had two more years on the plan I already prepaid for.”

Downtime issues led to the search for a new website host

With a focus on improving Express Legal Funding’s SEO rankings, Aaron realized they couldn’t move forward with their recurring website issues with their previous hosts.

“Squarespace was always having downtime issues. Google Search Console was aware and critical of that dependability issue.”

Server downtime affects SEO. If a search engine crawls a website when it’s down, it might temporarily be de-indexed. Google has been known to crawl a site less frequently if it experiences downtime, which isn’t good for its SEO. It was time for them to look for a reliable web hosting provider.

“My main criteria for selecting a web host was SEO. I spent a couple of months researching and learning about the various ranking factors tied to web hosts. I wanted my website to rank more quickly, and I needed my web host selection to help Express Legal Funding rank at the top of the Google search results.”

The solution

Hosting may not be the most well-known component of SEO, but it’s an important one. The Express Legal Funding site needs to function well to be favored by Google, and Kinsta ensures that with Google’s top CPU servers.

With the help of the support team, moving the Express Legal Funding sites to Kinsta was easy and simple for Aaron and his team. After migrating to Kinsta, they saw a drastic improvement on their main website: “PageSpeed and Core Web vitals improved dramatically. The website has been straightforward to maintain. Google obviously trusts it, as we routinely benefit from being selected for featured snippets.”

“Kinsta’s support team was very helpful in assisting with the migration. They also solved an issue I had due to the custom theme of my personal blog that wasn’t compatible with PHP 8.0, which Kinsta required for security reasons at that time. They then helped me prevent downtime while I was switching to a new theme using Kinsta’s staging environment. Now, all the sites under my direction are running PHP 8.3.”

Powerful web architecture with Google’s fastest servers

On the infrastructure end, we utilize the latest VMS and Premium Tier network, which offers low latency and faster traffic routing by avoiding public Internet pipelines as much as possible.

At the core of Kinsta hosting is a containerized hosting stack powered by custom implementations of LXD, Nginx, MariaDB, and the latest versions of PHP. Kinsta offers a unique infrastructure that containerizes site resources so they don’t have to share and account for potential resource stealing.

Now, Express Legal Funding doesn’t have to worry about other websites potentially affecting their site’s resources and performance.

MyKinsta dashboard for easy site management

Switching from the complicated cPanel to MyKinsta was a lifesaver for Express Legal Funding. They no longer dread managing their websites.

Aaron said, “Managing our sites has become much simpler! With Kinsta, I can set it up and not worry about it. My site just runs smoothly.”

The MyKinsta dashboard gives them a quick snapshot of their WordPress sites, including monthly visits, billing details, and usage stats for disk space, the CDN, data transfer, and unique visits.

Free one-push staging environment

At Kinsta, each WordPress installation comes with its own free staging area, separate from the live site.

Aaron and his team can easily switch between their live and staging environments. The staging environment allows them to freely try out new plugins, themes, the latest PHP versions, changes to their code, and more. And once they’re ready to update their live site, it only takes one click to push all those changes.

99.9% SLA-backed uptime with 24/7/365 support

Reputation is crucial for Express Legal Funding. Clients looking for funding solutions are less apt to trust a broken site. If their site is down, it could make them seem unreliable, and potential clients might look elsewhere.

Downtime or errors can lead to missed opportunities and loss of revenue, so site issues must be quickly fixed to avoid disrupting their service and losing their clients’ trust.

Our team monitors all sites on our infrastructure 480 times a day (every three minutes) and offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If our monitoring detects that a site isn’t loading, our engineers respond quickly to restore service to the site.

Plus, having access to 24/7/365 expert support guarantees the reliability they need to offer top-notch financial services to their clients at all times.

The result

Organic traffic surge from 40 to 20,000+ monthly visitors

After migrating to Kinsta, Express Legal Funding experienced significant improvements in its website performance and SEO. While hosting isn’t often discussed as an SEO factor, moving to Kinsta boosted their rankings, traffic, and conversions. This is because Google values site speed, reliability, server uptime, and security – all of which improved when they migrated to Kinsta.

“Our website and SEO foundation are essential to our business, and having Kinsta as our web host facilitates online traffic. Most of our business growth has come after we migrated to Kinsta. Before, our SEO efforts were limited.”

Search engines like Google prioritize faster websites in their rankings because a fast load time improves the user experience. Faster sites are more likely to retain visitors as they reduce bounce rates and increase the likelihood of conversions.

“Before switching to Kinsta, we were getting about 40 organic visitors per month. Now, we are averaging over 20,000 monthly organic visitors. That’s how we generate new leads and future referrals.”

C3D server upgrade boosts speed by 27%

At Kinsta, maximizing the performance of our clients’ websites is a top priority. As a result, Express Legal Funding benefits from only the best and fastest web infrastructure on the market – a promise that Kinsta delivers on, as evidenced by the massive speed increase on their website.

“I remember being thrilled when Kinsta upgraded my hosting to use Google Cloud’s new C3D technology for free. This is just one example of how Kinsta goes above and beyond to provide the best service without extra charges.”

Until now, the best fit for Kinsta’s hosting platform was GCP’s compute-optimized C2 machines, but the introduction of C3D machines has further improved virtual machine performance through better hardware and a more efficient approach to input/output operations. This switch resulted in a 27% improvement in mobile response times for Express Legal Funding.

“Moving to C3D has made a significant difference. GTMetrix shows that our website connection time has improved. Before upgrading to C3D, the connection time on mobile was 56ms. Now it is 44ms. I am excited about this as it facilitates my SEO-focused growth strategy.”

Peace of mind with 24/7/365 expert support

Express Legal Funding is reassured to know they can always reach our team of engineers and WordPress experts anytime. Our support team is available 24/7/365, even on holidays and weekends, no matter where you are.

Plus, Kinsta doesn’t use a tiered support system, which means no frustrating escalations or transfers. Every customer gets direct access to our expert Support team, no matter what plan they’re on.

“I recommend Kinsta because it’s reliable and offers great value. You don’t have to worry about hosting your website; uptime is guaranteed. This gave me peace of mind and convinced me to upgrade my website sooner. It shows that the old advice ‘if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it’ doesn’t apply here.”

Save time with free and easy to use built-in tools

Express Legal Funding no longer has to deal with the stress of website management. Kinsta takes care of many aspects for them, such as setting up and maintaining hardware and software, providing technical support, and ensuring their content management system (CMS) is up to date and functioning smoothly. Tools such as the MyKinsta dashboard, Kinsta Staging, and the APM tool empower them to focus more on reaching their business goals.

“Moving forward, we plan to continue to leverage Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting as we create new and original content for our company website and blog.”

“Also, as we work on creating a more modern, updated look and feel for our website, Kinsta’s premium staging environment will be very helpful. It allows us to get accurate PageSpeed scores before pushing the site live, further protecting our SEO effort.”

The conclusion

Express Legal Funding significantly increased its monthly organic traffic from 40 to an impressive 20,000 average site visits. Key to this growth was the boost in site speed – critical for SEO – along with the ease of managing their site and access to 24/7 support. In addition, their recent upgrade to Google Cloud Platform C3D machines resulted in a 27% increase in mobile site speed, building on the improvements they saw after moving to Kinsta.

Now, they can focus more on growing Express Legal Funding by improving SEO and creating new content, free from worrying about website issues.

Aaron Winston, Strategy Director
Express Legal Funding

The post How Express Legal Funding grew organic traffic by 50,000% and simplified site management appeared first on Kinsta®.

Founded in 1946, UNICEF works to ensure all children of the world have a fair chance in life. Now, with a presence in over 190 countries and territories, they continue to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.

Serving as a helping hand for every child in need, UNICEF collects contributions to aid children in over 150 of the world’s poorest countries. They ensure children’s survival, education, and safety, both with long-term development programs and with emergency reliefs during disasters.

Check out our interview below with UNICEF Denmark Webmaster Annika Lindgreen to learn more about their experience with Kinsta.

Snapshot

• Industry: Non-profit
• Number of Employees: 150+

The Problem

To accommodate UNICEF Denmark’s high traffic spike, their former hosting company wanted them to upgrade to a top-tier plan that would increase their hosting cost by 300%.

“As UNICEF Denmark’s digital presence continues to grow, so does the traffic to UNICEF’s websites. The increased traffic (or bandwidth in this case) caused our previous host to increase their prices. They wanted to move us to a top-tier plan that would have increased our hosting cost by 300%. This is a lot for any company, but especially for a non-government organization (NGO) where each dollar counts.

We had 7 sites running at the previous host and we dreaded the thought of moving so many sites to a new host.”

The Solution

UNICEF Denmark saves time and money with Kinsta’s scalable hosting, discounted plans for nonprofits, and free site migration with no downtime.

“Our new digital agency SkovJacobsen recommended ‌we move to Kinsta as they don’t charge for bandwidth, plus, they offer an NGO discount. Kinsta also does not force upgrading to a larger plan if you get more visitors during a campaign-month. You just pay a small fee for the extra traffic, which makes controlling costs much easier.

In our case, we were also quite intrigued by Kinsta’s claim that they would move all of our 7 sites to their platform – for free. It almost seemed too good to be true.”

The Result

All 7 sites of UNICEF Denmark were moved to Kinsta within 48 hours, without any downtime. This major switch resulted in an 88% reduction in their hosting costs.

“The migration of all 7 sites was extremely smooth and fast. All sites were moved within 48 hours by Kinsta’s migration team.  Everything just worked. Our digital agency didn’t have to change a single line of code. We had zero downtime.

With the included NGO discount, our move to Kinsta reduced our hosting cost by 88%.”

The post UNICEF Denmark saves 88% in hosting costs with Kinsta appeared first on Kinsta®.

Their mission is no less than to become the most drinkable tea on the planet. Their products are a celebration of Australia, and a huge part of their endeavor is to connect Australia and invite people to enjoy tea together.

When you hear Troy talk about tea, you’ll immediately sense that tea is not just a drink for him and his crew, it’s a passion: “We’re about what can we enjoy together. And tea it is. Campfires it is. Land and country it is. We’re trying to wrap that up in a teabag.”

Blak Brews reached a major milestone when Troy was cast for Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars TV show and won the grand prize and Gordon Ramsay’s mentorship!

Troy shares his journey and experience on the show, and together with his web developer, Istephan Cingoz, they explain how Troy’s appearance on Food Stars and major success of winning the show affected his business and website, and what’s next for Blak Brews.

Join us as we unveil Blak Brews’ stunning adventure and success and how they conquered a massive traffic spike with Kinsta’s help.

The problem

When Troy started Blak Brews in late 2022, he chose Shopify to launch the site. It’s a platform that provides an out-of-the-box, hosted solution to launching an online store. Shopify served Blak Brews well, but then something happened: Troy was selected to compete on Gordon Ramsay’s team!

The show started filming; not only did Troy have to face challenges on-set (like the complete reimagining and rebranding of a classic Australian snack, delivering a fine dining experience, or making Vegemite appealing to American audiences), but he also needed to make sure Blak Brews’ site was up-to-speed and ready to handle thousands of simultaneous visitors and requests before Food Stars started airing.

CMS limitations and expected traffic spikes

Right after the show Food Stars ended, Troy and Istephan began preparing the Blak Brews website for increased traffic to ensure it would run smoothly. During their review of different options, they realized the need for a solution that was not only more customizable but also more cost-effective.

“With Shopify, we had to keep adding more premium subscriptions to programs to do what we want to do,” Troy explains. “That’s when Istephan’s expertise came in especially handy.”

Through his web development background, he was able to find the perfect match for Blak Brews’ website and advised the switch from Shopify.

Troy was locked into Shopify, and we saw fees increasing unjustifiably. For the growth they were expecting, costs would have been over the roof.

Thus the migration from Shopify to WooCommerce was initiated to create a fresh, new site that could appeal to increased traffic while each episode of Food Stars would be on air.

Steph explained: “We were already envisioning what the potential estimate of visitors could be on the site at the same time. One thousand. Two thousand – easily. We needed to make sure that Shopify could do this. Yes, they can, but it’s through the roof. With WooCommerce, it’s a lot more open; customers can do so much more, and it’s way more cost-effective because it’s all open-source. Lot more choices, lot more variables. And it’s great for projects like this.”

Besides a more optimizable, cost-effective platform and clean code, Istephan also wanted to ensure that all pages loaded fast under heavy traffic. As an expert in optimizing sites, he understands the importance of speed testing and site performance:

You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if each webpage is loading 4-5 seconds, your conversions are going to decrease.

The solution

A platform to handle heavy traffic and simultaneous requests

Istephan, with his extensive expertise in website development, has spent over seven years researching managed hosting providers to find the best fit for each site’s specific requirements.

He is willing to go the extra mile to make sure his clients’ sites are in good hands. Istephan recalls looking into one of Kinsta’s resources during his research.

For many sites, I used Flywheel, which was good at first, however, it started to degrade in quality. What I loved was Kinsta’s side-by-side take, the comparison ‘Flywheel vs. Kinsta.’ That blew me away; how comprehensive that blog post was, and that got me really excited when I had my frustrations at Flywheel.

“I was working with WPX hosting; however, the volume of traffic that Troy was having wasn’t going to work. Because they wouldn’t be able to handle thousands of visitors simultaneously, and that’s what Kinsta was able to help with.”

As part of the process, Istephan considered other Managed WordPress hosting providers he had previously worked with but decided to go with Kinsta. He was confident that the platform could handle the traffic load.

Reliable hosting with support that cares

Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars was a life-changing experience for Troy, which he said “was not comparable to any moments in life.”

Troy and Istephan had a couple of months to start preparing the site for increased traffic. They wanted a platform they could trust—one that could give them confidence that the site would stay up no matter what.

Troy worked hard on the show, had fun, and earned the success that he wanted to celebrate carelessly: “When the show aired, it was so exciting. It was just intense. We did a few viewing parties in different locations. I made sure I remembered it and showed it to people.”

Kinsta’s role was crucial in providing a safe and steady environment for Blak Brews’ website. Istephan explains how he wanted to make sure that Troy could live and celebrate his achievements to the fullest without the need to worry about his site’s uptime: “You don’t want to have any downtime in those moments, that’s crucial. I can’t just go up to Troy and say: hey, your website crashed while you were having a party. That’s not good.”

Hosting the site on Kinsta’s platform gave Troy and Istephan confidence that the site would be in good hands and the traffic would be no issue.

Istephan expands with his compliments on Kinsta’s support: “One of the biggest reliefs is ensuring you have a hosting provider that can handle that, keeping everything at ease.”

You know you’re going to be looked after, especially with support. You can get support with Kinsta within 2 minutes if anything goes disastrous.

“Their techies are very easy to talk to, and they’ll help you guide help if there’s a plugin conflict, and you’re not going to be in the dark as opposed to other hosting providers where they don’t have support 24/7.”

User-friendly platform and built-in tools

Kinsta’s custom-built dashboard is specifically designed to simplify the maintenance and development of websites. It also provides users with easy access to their company’s billing information, allowing them to upgrade or downgrade their subscriptions as needed.

MyKinsta helped ease workflows for Blak Brews. Istephan reflected on the fact that a functional and easy-to-use dashboard is crucial.

The dashboard is very easy to show to clients; they can access billing, and they’ll look after you. And unlike cPanel, MyKinsta feels more comfortable.

Custom Managed WordPress plan for scalable sites

As the broadcast of the final episode approached, Troy and Istephan wanted to make sure that they were prepared for traffic spikes and thus chose to upgrade to a dedicated server solution.

With Kinsta’s custom plan, they were able to configure the server and take measures to optimize the site for increased traffic.

Istephan complimented this scalability, easy access to billing information, and client care:

One of the big perks of Kinsta is that it has small plans all the way up to enterprise. No matter what, you feel confident that your client’s gonna be safe and sound. Downgrading and upgrading is also very easy, depending on where you want to be at. Very helpful.

The result

Seamless season finale with 24/7 expert support

The airing of the final episode finally came and as part of the process, Troy and Istephan decided to bump the site up to a Kinsta custom plan to ensure its smooth running.

Istephan also ran numerous tests priorly and, to be on the safe side, opened a support ticket for the airtime of Food Stars’ final episode and had one of Kinsta’s support engineers monitor the site and assist him throughout the show’s runtime.

I was pleased that the support engineer was happy to stay around for the next two hours, helping to monitor. You wouldn’t expect to do such a thing from a support agent on chat. It was incredible. It helped ease the tension.

They didn’t just use us as another support ticket. It was more human. An interaction. They understood what we were up for and understood the risks.

Troy’s big win on Food Stars

On Gordon’s team on the show, Troy faced many challenges that tested his creativity, endurance, and devotion. He mastered each challenge and made it to the final four.

The grand finale came, and Troy presented his deeply moving pitch on the show to the mentors and an audience of hundreds of people on site, and even more watching from their homes; winning the show’s mentors’ and the audience’s hearts.

But it wasn’t the only thing he won. Troy has won Food Stars!

Peak performance under high-traffic pressure

A massive task waited for Istephan as well during the finale of the show; he needed to make sure Blak Brews’ site was running smoothly without any glitches during checkout.

While Istephan had a chat open with Kinsta’s support, he kept monitoring the site’s metrics and performance.

Five hundred visitors for the entire hour on the site, all at the same time. With Kinsta, we were able to handle that, piece of cake. We didn’t even sweat! People were able to add to their cart and then check out – there was no wait time. It loaded as if there was only one person on the site. It just empowered us.

Bright future for Blak Brews

Kinsta has lived up to Troy and Istephan’s expectations. Troy has many plans for building Blak Brews’ brand into a global company with its roots in Australia. He is looking to align with respectful partners, brands, and identities across the globe.

What does the future hold for Blak Brews’ website? They are looking to take advantage of Kinsta’s tools and services more.

“We’re going to have a wholesale subdomain soon, and we’re gonna be able to have that. It’s very affordable and justifiable,” Istephan explains.

They also plan to elevate the site by adding pairing it with an application:

Kinsta is perfect for WordPress and application—it’s all-in-one. Billing, support, dashboard… all in there it’s great! We’ll always host on Kinsta.

The conclusion

Moving from Shopify to WooCommerce and hosting Blak Brews’ site on Kinsta has helped Troy and Istephan gain confidence during the first major peak on the website. Troy celebrated his success without site downtime or other issues shadowing his joy, while Istephan was confident in his work with state-of-the-art tools and expert support by his side.

But this is just the beginning for Blak Brews. Nothing stands in the way of the company’s growth. Troy has started working on his plan for the upcoming years, and his exciting journey continues to spread his passion for flavors. He’s looking forward to delivering cups of tea and a drop of Indigenous culture and the Native tastes of Australia to people all over the world. Kinsta will be proud to support him in this venture!

The post Blak Brews easily handles traffic spikes after winning Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars appeared first on Kinsta®.