Justin Meadows built TunedWP from a simple beginning, an SEO consultant experimenting with personal blogs and discovering what worked. What started as curiosity quickly evolved into a mission to help businesses fix, optimise, and elevate their WordPress websites.
Driven by necessity and a desire for dependable solutions, he formed a team that transformed his freelance work into a thriving agency. Today, Justin Meadows focuses on WordPress optimisation, long-term support, and partnerships that help businesses grow with confidence.
Beginnings of a Vision
Justin didn’t start out running a large digital agency. In the beginning, he was simply an SEO consultant, experimenting with his own personal blogs and learning what worked. “I started out as an SEO consultant after learning how to get effective with SEO on my own personal blogs,” Justin says.
As he began helping businesses, he ran into a recurring problem. Their websites needed fixing and constant support, but there wasn’t a reliable provider he could trust. “There was no reliable provider that I could find, so I ended up building an internal team,” he recalls.
– The growing TunedWP team, built from necessity and united by a mission to make WordPress work better for businesses. (Source: TunedWP)
What began as a necessity soon turned into a new direction. Justin and his team shifted their focus to website support, specifically WordPress optimization. “We still provide SEO services,” he explains, “but the focus of our business is now oxfxfn WordPress support and optimisation.” Today, his agency partners with other firms that handle design, SEO strategy, or ads, while his team manages the technical side, optimization, and implementation.
Finding the Right Fit
Justin never set out to serve one specific industry. Instead, he focused on a certain stage of business growth. “We didn’t choose a specific industry,” he says. “We chose a type of situation that businesses were in where they needed support with getting their WordPress website up-to-date with the growth of their business.”
His agency primarily helps service-based businesses, not too small, not too large. “We don’t want to work with businesses that are so large that it’s hard to implement our suggestions effectively,” Justin explains. At the same time, start-ups don’t yet benefit fully from his team’s expertise. “Start-ups are not ideal because they can’t take advantage of the power that we can provide until they have their business more established,” he adds.
Over time, this careful positioning allowed his agency to grow sustainably and build meaningful, long-term relationships with clients.
Milestones and Challenges
When asked about his biggest achievements, Justin smiles. “Having clients in every continent (except Antarctica) is a pretty cool achievement,” he says. But he quickly adds that the most meaningful milestone came when they reached 300 clients, a long-held goal that marked a turning point. “That’s a target that I had for a long time,” he recalls, “and I knew that would give us the economies of scale we needed to stay sustainable.”
– As a Cloudways Agency Partner, TunedWP benefits from dedicated support and smooth client migrations.
Not every step was easy. The agency’s rapid growth came with lessons. “We grew really fast and relied a lot on building new websites from agency partners that we were white-labelling our services to,” Justin explains. When projects slowed down, the business faced a quiet period that tested their resilience. “We added our own brand where we could have control over acquiring new customers,” he says, “and focused a lot more on our recurring services rather than the one-off projects.”
Through adaptability and persistence, the team found balance and stability.
Values That Drive Success
For Justin, success comes down to three strategies, all tied to the agency’s core values. “The top three strategies of our success and growth have been very closely tied to our three core values,” he shares.
- Constant Innovation: “We have constantly evolved and adapted to changes in the marketplace and opportunities that come up,” he says. His team always looks for the next edge.
- Caring Deeply: Most of their clients come through referrals. “Keeping our existing clients comes from caring about them enough that they refer other people to us,” Justin explains. “They stick around for ages and tell other people about how good we are.”
- Proactive Communication: “Good, fast communication has been one of the strongest points of difference that we’ve had,” he says proudly. Quick, thoughtful responses have given the agency “a really big edge” in client satisfaction.
– The core values that guide TunedWP’s success: proactive communication, caring deeply, and constant innovation. (Source: TunedWP)
Justin remembers one of their toughest projects, a client whose once-dominant SEO rankings had collapsed. His team discovered outdated tactics and a neglected website. “We needed to go and make a lot of site-wide optimisations,” he recalls. After hard work and careful SEO restructuring, they restored and improved the client’s rankings. It was, as he describes it, “a very big project and took a lot of work.”
Growth, Tools, and the Road Ahead
Running hundreds of websites demands powerful tools. “GoHighLevel has been really good to use for a CRM,” Justin says. He also uses Wispr Flow for voice-to-text. “It’s saving a lot of time with typing; in fact, I’m using that to write this right now.” Loom Videos has been “a really valuable tool” for both client updates and internal feedback.
Looking forward, Justin is focused on the future of online interaction. “We’ve focused heavily this year on developing AI search strategies,” he explains. His goal is to ensure both his agency and his clients “are being recommended and understood by AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.” He believes this focus will “keep us relevant and help our clients stay relevant.”
Justin also credits Cloudways for helping his agency scale efficiently. “We have been using Cloudways since we first tested it out back in 2017,” he recalls. Before that, they relied on cPanel infrastructure at Liquid Web. “The main reason we switched to Cloudways was to take advantage of cloud hosting.” The flexibility to choose hosting providers and the “solid infrastructure” were perfect for his clients in Australia.
– Cloudways’ flexible cloud infrastructure empowers TunedWP to deliver fast, reliable hosting for clients worldwide.
Among Cloudways’ features, two stand out the most: migration tools and premium support. “The migration tools have helped us as we’ve needed to occasionally change platforms and we’re managing 300 websites,” he says. The ability to onboard and move clients easily has been “an awesome tool.” As for support, Justin adds, “The premium support has allowed us to react quickly to identify and react to serious problems.”
He remembers one particular crisis, a server hardware failure that could have been disastrous. “The premium support team helped us to manage that process quickly and seamlessly,” he recalls gratefully.
Over the years, Justin has tried other providers such as HostGator, Liquid Web, and others through client projects, but Cloudways stands out. “Definitely, the ease of use and flexibility of Cloudways is just really awesome,” he says.
– Recognised partners and proven expertise, TunedWP brings over 16 years of experience, trusted tools, and around-the-clock support.
When asked for advice to new agency founders, Justin keeps it simple. “Focus on quality service above all else.” He believes pricing, features, and even service types can evolve, “but quality service is the most important element.”
He sums up his agency’s journey in three short values, the same ones that guide everything they do: “Proactive communication, caring deeply, and constant innovation.”
Interested in working with TunedWP? You can connect with Justin Meadows on LinkedIn or through their website. We recently interviewed him as part of our Agency Spotlight series.
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
