About Snowplow

Snowplow is an advanced behavioral data platform which offers a privacy-compliant solution for organizations like Strava, Steve Madden and Flickr. 

Snowplow’s website plays a critical role in their marketing strategy. Snowplow’s Website Product Owner Scott Mackintosh explains: “Our website is our number one marketing platform. It’s the hub for all of our lead generation activities, and everything we do leads to the website. As a tech company, it’s really important for us to have a modern tech stack for our website that is fast, secure and reliable.”

Challenges

Snowplow was hosting their website in a traditional way with a traditional Enterprise-focused managed WordPress hosting provider, but it was causing them a lot of frustration. First, they were generally concerned about security – running their WP site with the backend and LAMP stack always accessible felt like an ongoing cause for concern. Also, the need to constantly be on top of updating plugins to keep their site secure was very stressful.

Second, their hosting provider would update their WordPress version without advanced notice, which sometimes broke their site and/or caused downtime. This was a very painful experience and they were looking for a hosting provider that gave them more control over when and how their site was updated.

Third, they needed more responsiveness from customer support. When their site had issues, like those mentioned above, they’d find themselves waiting for anywhere from 48-72 hours, which was unacceptable when their site was experiencing major issues. As a result, they were focused on finding a WordPress hosting provider with very responsive support.

And finally, as a forward-thinking company with modern workflows on their applications, they also wanted to apply modern development workflows to their WordPress site. Their hosting provider’s workflow was very rigid, and hard to navigate. This added to their team’s overall frustration.

Enter Strattic… 

Optimal solution for both marketing and engineering teams

As a web expert, Scott understood how important it was to take Snowplow’s website to the next level, but he also knew he needed to find a solution that would get approved by both engineering and marketing.

Scott says, “We wanted a modern solution that would allow our marketing team to use WordPress, their tool of choice, while eliminating performance issues and addressing some of the security problems raised by the engineering team. So we started checking out headless options. We were looking at building a Gatsby frontend on top of WordPress, but that was just too much of an engineering headache for us. But we also didn’t want to continue using out-of-the-box WordPress. That’s how we stumbled upon Strattic.” 

Scott found the modern tech stack he was looking for in Strattic’s unique hosting platform which generates a static version of a WordPress site, offering a solution that satisfies both developers and marketers.

Blindingly fast performance

Scott was majorly impressed by the speed of their static WordPress site on Strattic.

“The performance on Strattic really is incredible,” Scott says. “The frontend suddenly becomes blindingly fast, and plugins don’t slow down sites at all on Strattic. So we can add many more plugins without them having a measurable negative impact on performance.”

Scott adds, “On our previous hosting provider, our Lighthouse scores were in the 50-60 range and now we’re at 97. This is a really big deal for us because organic SEO plays a major role in our business.”

Snowplow also saw major performance improvements for their Time to First Byte (TTFB) and First Contentful Paint (FCP), both of which improved by 21% immediately after moving to Strattic.

Confident scaling during traffic spikes

When Snowplow’s latest funding round was announced on all the major tech publications, they felt confident that their site was in good hands with Strattic, and that the site would have no problem handling the influx of traffic. “At no point during the announcement did I have any concerns about the ability of the site to scale for the increased traffic,” Scott says.

Effortless security

With Strattic, WordPress is decoupled and removed from the equation and visitors experience only a static replica of the site, so there’s almost nothing available to hack.

“As a tech company that handles data, the security aspect for us is also huge. The fact that the WordPress backend is obfuscated and not accessible unless you have Strattic permissions was a major selling point for us,” Scott says. 

Unrivaled customer support from Strattic

Highly responsive support is another advantage that Scott and his team discovered after moving to secure static WordPress hosting on Strattic. 

Scott is enthusiastic when describing his onboarding experience: “The number one aspect of a hosting solution is support. We get replies from the Strattic team within minutes. The Strattic team is excellent and has been amazingly helpful at getting us on board and answering all our questions. They truly go above and beyond anything I’ve ever experienced with other tech companies. It saves us so much stress, knowing I’ve got a support team that is there for us.”