Babbel moves from Unbounce to static WordPress on Strattic, improves load time by 65% and sees a 5.1% increase in conversions

Babbel increases conversions 5.1% by moving to Strattic
Static and headless WordPress. In one click.

With millions of subscribers globally, Babbel was selected as the most innovative company in education according to FastCompany, and provides highly effective online language learning courses for people who want to find the shortest path to a real-life conversation in a new language.

The Challenge: finding a fast, secure, design-friendly, and mobile-responsive landing page solution

Offering courses in so many languages means that Babbel has developed a massive and diverse series of landing page campaigns. According to Fabio Biocchetti, Babbel’s Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Manager, they have “hundreds of scenario-specific pages catering to millions of potential new users.”

Unfortunately, their chosen landing page solution, Unbounce, wasn’t performing as needed, and they were experiencing scalability and performance issues on their marketing landing pages for Babbel for Business. In addition, there were design limitations and they had problems with responsiveness, especially on mobile. Mobile problems were particularly troubling since the majority of the company’s new sign-ups were on mobile.

Solving these problems required time-consuming workarounds.

The Solution: Strattic, WordPress, and Elementor

In search of an alternative, the team at Babbel started exploring their options, eventually settling on a near-ideal solution — designing their landing pages in Elementor on WordPress. Elementor is a WordPress page builder that allows non-technical users to build and customize responsive web pages easily and quickly.

Despite the clear design and mobile advantages of the WordPress/Elementor combination, Babbel still had reservations. Describing their misgivings, Biocchetti explains, “While we were able to build and manage beautiful new landing pages, we had concerns about moving to WordPress — concerns related to performance and security, including the possibility of DDoS attacks.”

To address this, the team at Babbel turned to Strattic, the secure, scalable hosting service that converts WordPress websites into headless static sites.

Great results with Strattic

From the outset, Babbel’s experience with Strattic was positive — from its ease of adoption to the immediate benefits the platform delivered. The move was the right choice according to Biocchetti, who said,

“Strattic solved all our problems at once with one single, simple solution.”

Unmatched security

WordPress security was no longer a concern for Babbel once they moved their website to Strattic, as the attack surface for potential hacks was practically eliminated.

“With Strattic we didn’t have to worry about security at all — which is always a big concern when you deal with a WordPress installation,” Biocchetti said. “That isn’t a concern here, since Strattic puts your environment on a separate domain which automatically shuts down when it is not in use.”

Unparalleled support

Highly responsive support is another advantage the team at Babbel discovered after adopting secure Strattic hosting. Describing their migration to the static platform, Biochetti is enthusiastic.

“Strattic support is super fast and effective. They answered all our questions in minutes and helped us optimize our CMS set up before we had even published our first page.”

Unarguable results: page load time (LCP) reduced by 65%; conversion rate up 5.1%

With their performance, security, and support issues all under control, the final test for Babbel came down to the numbers. After extensive A/B tests conducted by the Conversion Rate Optimization Team and analyzed by the Analytics & Data Engineering team, the Strattic+WordPress+Elementor combination decisively outperformed Unbounce.

“The Strattic/WordPress headless combination won with a 5.1% increase in conversions,” Biocchetti said. “It’s an impressive result and a huge achievement, especially when you consider that the variant we tested used the same content and layout as the control on our prior solution.”

WordPress like it should be

Asked to summarize his thoughts on moving to Strattic, Biocchetti responds,

“It’s WordPress like it should be — easily built, high performance, secure, scalable, truly fluid, and responsive. ”