Children’s Clothing Store Jan & Jul Improved 3x Traffic Growth, Reduced Server Cost by 50% and Load Time to 1.2s After Moving to Cloudways

About Jan & Jul

Jan & Jul is a children’s outdoor clothing store redefining how families experience the great outdoors. With a strong commitment to quality and ethical manufacturing, Jan & Jul is making waves in the industry with their range of weather-protective gear. Whether you have a baby, toddler, or big kid, Jan & Jul has covered you.

Buckle up as we unveil how Jan & Jul’s decision to partner with Cloudways as their hosting provider has improved their online presence. Stay tuned to discover how their website’s performance skyrocketed, sales soared, and Cloudways’ cost-effective and scalable solutions transformed Jan & Jul’s business operations.

With Cloudways as their trusted partner, Jan & Jul’s journey is a testament to the remarkable impact that reliable hosting can have on an online business. Let’s learn from Florence Luo, the owner and CEO of Jan and Jul, and how Cloudways’ hosting can unlock new possibilities for your business endeavors.

Cloudways: Can you please tell us what Jan & Jul is about and what kind of business you do? Where do you operate, and who is your target audience?

Florence Luo: Jan & Jul is a children’s outdoor clothing store. We’re all about helping families get outdoors with quality weather-protective gear like sun hats and rainwear.

Everything is designed here in Vancouver, while our products are made ethically in my hometown in China. Our target audience is nature-loving parents of babies, toddlers, and big kids.

Cloudways: Why did you choose Cloudways as Jan & Jul’s hosting provider? How long have you been using Cloudways services? Are you satisfied with our hosting?

Florence Luo: Our brand has grown tremendously over the past few years. With more traffic and expanding product lines, we wanted a scalable solution on demand where we could monitor resource usage from our end.

We started using Cloudways in March 2023. Transferring the server was so quick and easy! We are extremely satisfied with our decision to move to Cloudways. Making the switch has also helped boost our sales and SEO rankings.

Cloudways: Can you describe your Jan & Jul store performance? How fast does it load? How often does it experience downtime? Is the overall speed satisfactory?

Florence Luo: With our cache setup correctly, our homepage now loads in 1.2 seconds, and our page speed ratings are 98 for desktop and 88 for mobile. With our previous hosts, we never reached 50 on either desktop or mobile!

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Cloudways: In what ways has Cloudways hosting helped Jan and Jul’s online store to scale and handle high levels of traffic?

Florence Luo: We have seasonal sales, which gain a lot of traction and excitement from our audience. When we scale the server up for these events, the server is 2x – 4x bigger in just 10 minutes.

Once the peak is over, we scale back down. It’s very efficient and cost-effective, one of the main reasons we opted for Cloudways.

Cloudways: What security measures do Cloudways offer to protect Jan & Jul store and customer data? How do you see our backup solution in case of data loss?

Florence Luo: Cloudways has better protection against bots than cPanel & WebHost Manager (WHM) hosts, but adding a Web Application Firewall (WAF) has helped us further secure the website.

We think Cloudways could do more in this area to assure client safety. We find the backup feature to be easy and reliable. We perform backups every 3 hours, which is only $0.033/GB per server for off-site backups.

Cloudways: Have you utilized any of the additional features offered by Cloudways, such as SafeUpdates and Cloudflare? If so, how was your experience with these features?

Florence Luo: We have not started using SafeUpdates yet, but we do use Cloudflare CDN. Using CloudFlare CDN really improves the website’s speed and bot protection. We are waiting for a full-page cache and really hope it gets released sometime!

Cloudways: In what ways has Cloudflare CDN improved the speed and security of Jan and Jul’s website, and how has it integrated with Cloudways hosting?

Florence Luo: Without a CDN, we have a very high CPU usage, even after properly setting up the website cache. Cloudflare CDN helps take the load off the CPU and distributes the requests to the nearest data center. Thanks to a CDN, we can now handle about twice the amount of traffic compared to before.

Cloudways: How has the cost-effectiveness of Cloudways hosting benefited Jan and Jul’s business operations and overall profitability?

Florence Luo: Using Cloudways has helped us reduce up to 20% of server costs, and if we consider scalability, we have reduced up to 50% of our costs. After all, hosting is quite pricey! Having on-demand scalability has saved us a lot in terms of server costs and our team’s labor hours.

For example, if we scale up for 3 days for a sale event, we pay only the extra cost for 3 days instead of the entire month! And it just takes 10 minutes and a few clicks.

Cloudways: How has Cloudways hosting enabled Jan and Jul to provide customers with a seamless and user-friendly online shopping experience?

Florence Luo: We always wanted a responsive, light website that loads quickly. 80% of our traffic comes from mobile users accustomed to app-like load times. High-speed loading is crucial to provide our customers with a great user experience and increase conversions.

Now with Cloudways, the server handles 2-3 times more traffic than our previous host at 10% less cost. We’ve even seen more organic search results on Google for Jan and Jul! Switching to Cloudways was one of the best decisions for our brand.