Jacaranda Finance is an Australian-based online neo-lender that specialises in fast personal finance. Founded in 2013 by CEO Daniel Wessels, Jacaranda was built to meet the needs of the new age of consumers who didn’t want to spend hours or even days waiting to apply with a legacy lender.
Jacaranda offers personal loans (up to $15,000) and car loans (up to $25,000) for Australians with a wide range of different financial circumstances, and its state-of-the-art lending platform allows it to assess customer applications and transfer funds extremely fast.
Check out our interview below with Chris Alvarez, Senior Frontend Developer at Jacaranda Finance, to learn more about their experience with Kinsta.
Snapshot
- Industry: Financial Services
- Size of company: 60+ employees
The Problem
Going for a cheaper host option compromised Jacaranda’s business goals. Frequent downtime, poor site performance, and slow support queries hindered their growth and success.
Because Jacaranda Finance operates 100% online and relies on its speed as a point of difference, having a reliable hosting provider was essential to meeting its goals as a business.
Jacaranda has tens of thousands of unique visitors each month and hundreds of customers. Any time the website experienced issues such as crashing or being too slow to meet customer needs, the business suffered as a result.
Unfortunately, this happened far too often according to Senior Frontend Developer Chris Alvarez.
“Our previous host was not performant, prone to frequent outages, and slow to respond to our support queries,” Chris said. “We had initially gone with the cheaper option for hosting when the business began, which was a mistake on our part.
“We currently receive thousands of unique visitors each month where data stacks up fast. We quickly came to realise that if we wanted to meet our goals as a business and go to the next level, we needed to make a serious upgrade to our hosting provider.”
So the search began.
The Solution
Kinsta came out ahead of its competitors after Jacaranda ran performance tests on various web host providers. With Kinsta’s competitive pricing and industry-leading performance, Jacaranda chose Kinsta as their new WordPress hosting provider.
After some lengthy investigations and research into various different hosting platforms, Jacaranda ended up on Kinsta’s website. Immediately impressed, what really stood out to the team was Kinsta’s competitive pricing compared to the big names in the industry, without compromising on performance or functionality.
“We created accounts on various providers and ran performance tests, and Kinsta came out ahead of its competitors,” Chris said.
It didn’t take long for the development team at Jacaranda to decide to pull the trigger and make Kinsta its new WordPress hosting provider.
The Result
Jacaranda saw an immediate 30% increase on their Google Page Speed Score right after moving to Kinsta. With 24/7/365 premium customer support, a smooth migration process, and streamlined site management, Jacaranda believes they are light years away from where they were before they made the switch!
According to Chris, the results from switching to Kinsta were immediate.
“Soon after making the change to Kinsta we saw our Google Page Speed Score increase by over 30%, which is crucial for both our customers’ experience and our SEO rankings,” he said.
“We’ve also been able to handle an influx of web visitors with little worry the site will have any hiccups, which it used to do frequently.
“And whenever issues do arise, Kinsta’s customer service team has usually had all our issues resolved in a few minutes.”
In recent months, the Jacaranda team has been busy migrating every single web page to a new version of its website, and Kinsta’s reliability has been a crucial factor in ensuring this difficult process went as smoothly as possible.
Kinsta’s ability to create staging sites has been crucial to this process, as the development team at Jacaranda can easily add new features and remove old ones in mere minutes.
“Overall, we’re light years away from where we were before we made the switch,” Chris said.
If you’re looking for a rock-solid, blazing-fast managed WordPress platform, look no further than Kinsta!
