LairdPage is a professional WordPress development agency that builds custom designed websites for its clients. Apart from building websites, it also offers other services including SEO, Content, and lead generation mechanisms. Andy has been developing websites for over 2 decades now and has vast experience when it comes to hosting sites and managing clients.
In this customer Q&A with Andy, we dig deep to find out how Cloudways has made business easier and better for Andy and his development agency.
Let’s begin!
Cloudways: Hello Andy, tell us a little bit about LairdPage. How and when did you start? What are some of the projects that you are proud of?
Andy:Â LairdPage is a relatively new venture although I have been developing WordPress websites for almost 20 years. I am the founder of two organizations based in Asia and recently expanded with LairdPage back in the UK.
Our projects are focused on simplicity, developing websites without all the bloated eye candy! Perhaps my favorite project is our own website as I focused on content (complemented with just a few simple graphics) and loading time.
Cloudways: Why did you choose Cloudways? Describe your selection process and what criteria you were looking for. What made our solution stand out over others that you researched?
Andy:Â To be honest it was a no-brainer! Cloudways offered the best features for WordPress, professional support, and some of the most competitive pricing structures to date!
We pay Cloudways for what we use and not a fixed annual fee. This gave us huge savings.
Most important was the big increase in page speed. Not just at the front end of our website but within the admin panel! No more delays while editing posts and pages.
Cloudways: How long have you been with Cloudways? What sort of things does Cloudways help LairdPage with?
Andy: I’ve only been with Cloudways for 3 months although this was enough time to win me over! I have since migrated six of our websites over to Cloudways. All our clients’ websites will be moved to Cloudways once their hosting package expires.
Cloudways: How did Cloudways help you resolve your problems? What do you think about the performance, speed, and security offered by Cloudways?
Andy:Â Speed was one of our top reasons for changing hosts. Page speed is very important to a user’s experience and also a ranking factor in search engines. We needed our pages and posts to load in under 3 seconds!
We were paying a premium and not getting that!
It’s vital to protect all our websites and Cloudways had us covered without having to install loads of expensive plugins. Our customers would soon lose trust if their sites were hacked and we needed to offer security. Each Cloudways account gave us firewalls, login security, bot protection, database security, and much more at no extra cost! Not forgetting a FREE easy to set up SSL certificate.
Cloudways: Share your experience with WordPress, PHP, & WooCommerce. How challenging it is to optimize them for performance? How many of your clients are hosted on Cloudways?
Andy:Â All our websites are built with WordPress and the Cloudways admin panel makes it easy to change PHP versions, add Varnish cache, Bot Protection, and more! Once you get the hang of how the admin panel works, that cPanel will be a thing of the past. Also see cpanel alternative
Cloudways: Which hosting company were you using before Cloudways and what limitations made you switch? When did you first come to know about Cloudways?
Andy:Â We were using SiteGround and had been with them for quite a few years. Their yearly fees were too high for the resources we were actually using. Page load times became slow and customer support, in my personal experience, was declining so I knew it was time to start looking around.
I discovered Cloudways by chance when I read good reviews on Facebook. With a little more searching I soon discovered Cloudways had built a good reputation so I decided to give them a try and compare them to SiteGround, See Siteground Alternative.
I duplicated a few of my websites hosted on SiteGround and imported them to Cloudways. When I did a comparison test, Cloudways was loading the test website in around a second compared to the average of 3 seconds. This page load time was achieved without even enabling Cloudways Varnish cache or anything else!
Cloudways: What are the three most used features on Cloudways that help increase productivity or that you find very useful?
Andy:Â 1. The ability to extend our server storage space with just a few clicks.
2. Setting up a top cloud hosting plan. It’s a lot more difficult to set up WordPress by going directly to. DigitalOcean, VULTR, etc. Now, we don’t need to be a techie to get the same level of services!
3. Incredible support even outside normal working hours. They were fast with their responses even when it was not related to technical issues.
Cloudways: It sounds like the service and support you get from Cloudways has been instrumental in helping your business grow?
Andy:Â Absolutely. If you prefer to spend more time developing your websites and less on configuration, Cloudways should be on the top of your list!
The support has been excellent! We had a couple of issues needing help (not due to Cloudways) which were resolved in minutes. Unlike many hosts, the Cloudways Support team remains courteous and demonstrated in-depth knowledge of their services.
This is a company that’s totally passionate about their services and customers! Combine Cloudways, with WordPress and Kadence WP – and you have the recipe for an amazing website!
Cloudways: What are five things that you think we do better than any other hosting provider and why would you recommend your customers to use Cloudways?
Andy:Â 1. Set up. You don’t need the bloat of a cPanel and installing WordPress is easy! You get to see your WordPress website live before pointing the domain name to your designated IP address!
2. Payments. You no longer have long term contracts tying you down to a host that doesn’t deliver or meet your expectations.
3. Dedicated resources. You don’t need to worry about other websites clogging up the server’s CPU and RAM.
4. Built-in advance cache options.
Mohammed Moeez
Moeez is a WordPress community manager at Cloudways. He loves to work closely with customers to understand their problems and come up with solutions that are not only beneficial but are long lasting as well. He also actively participates in the community to share his knowledge regarding Cloudways and hosting in general. In his free time he likes to watch football, workout and spend time on his PlayStation. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
