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Lily Ugbaja is a certified digital marketing expert experienced in scaling B2B SaaS businesses. She has been helping them in getting more organic traffic, engagement, and conversions with her quality content. She got “Analyser” as her nickname from her mom because she used to ask “why”, “how”, and “what if”.
Before migrating to Cloudways, Lily Ugbaja was facing issues with website speed and load time, and she started looking for a solution that could also help her in scaling her blogs. This case study highlights the challenges she faced and how Cloudways has helped her overcome them and increased her ROI.
Cloudways: Can you give a brief description of your agency?
Lily: I run a content strategy and writing business at lilyugbaja.com. To create an effective content strategy for my clients, I love to have first-hand experience. So I run sites of my own where I test out my strategies first and observe for challenges and stuff that I wouldn’t really know without being in the trenches myself.
Cloudways: What challenges were you facing that compelled you to start looking for a better solution?
Lily: I noticed that my sites were not as fast, and that affected how they grew in traffic. I’d grow the site traffic, then get a Google Analytics notification for site speed and rankings, and traffic would drop.
As you may know, rankings and even conversions are connected to site speed. If your site loads slowly, your optin forms may not show up at the right time, and readers may get frustrated and leave. All that bad user experience indicates to Google that your site isn’t the best result for the query.
Cloudways: What specific solution were you looking for in your ideal solution to your problem?
Lily: I was looking for something that could easily scale with increased traffic. The problem was that traffic levels would suddenly increase, and moving servers would be a pain. Also, the site speed wasn’t at its best. I needed something that hosted on the clouds. That way, I’d have speed and lower downtimes, and my servers would be easier to scale to accommodate my fast-growing sites.
Cloudways: How did you figure Cloudways had the best solution for your problems?
Lily: I asked around in my network, and this blogger whose opinion I respect a lot, Adam from Blogging Wizard, said Cloudways was great. But I didn’t blindly jump in based on one recommendation. I did more research and observed sites that monitor page speed and uptime for different hosts. Cloudways always ranked high in those reports
Cloudways: What success did you initially get after migrating to Cloudways?
Lily: The time it took my sites to load went down immediately. I remember experiencing a bump in traffic within two months after the migration. Traffic more than doubled. On my ads monetized site, I also noticed an increase in income. Apparently, the ads were loading faster, so my RPM was higher. There was also an increase in the number of leads per day.
Cloudways: Has Cloudways helped you save money or increase productivity?
Lily: The host I used before didn’t have automatic backups. With Cloudways, I don’t have to worry about backups because my sites get backed up daily. That has saved me a lot of head space and time.
I pay more for Cloudways now than I did with my previous host. But because of the increase in traffic, and I’m talking about over 100% increase in traffic, and earning 4 times what I used to earn with my sites. It’s been worth it.
Cloudways: Can you share any specific KPI or metric that shows how Cloudways works better with WordPress/WooCommerce?
Lily: I wish I’d saved before after screenshots for site speeds. I basically went from over 5 seconds load time to less than 3 seconds for my sites. My sites now pass Google’s Core Web Vitals.
Cloudways: What do you advise people willing to host their sites with Cloudways?
Lily: Even though I’m techy, I was concerned with handling the websites. I was concerned with managing the cloud infrastructure, which I’m pretty new to. But my fears were unfounded. The Cloudways customer success team is always available to chat you through everything you need — to fix whatever issue you have.
Cloudways: What cloud providers did you choose? What do you think of the flexibility of choosing a cloud provider at Cloudways?
Lily: DigitalOcean at first, but I’m considering moving to Vultr or Google Cloud now. I started with the lowest plan on DigitalOcean just to test the waters. I think this flexibility to choose creates healthy competition among the providers so that they keep delivering good value for money.
Cloudways: How would you rate our customer support experience?
Lily: Really good. Whenever I need to get something done, I just need to chat up support. Takes less than two minutes to get a response, and the responses are always helpful.
Cloudways: What overall impact did Cloudways have on your business? Before and after? Speed, performance, multiple site management?
Lily: My sites load under 3 seconds now, compared to around 5 seconds with heavy optimizations from before.
Cloudways: Was there anything surprising about moving to Cloudways?
Lily: It was a nice surprise to find the staging and pause app features. I could stimulate real-life experiences and tweak the website to perfection before I launched. And if I needed to retire a site, it was great just to pause the server and think about the decision with no extra bills.
Cloudways: Do you have any advice for people or businesses that may face the same problem as you did?
Lily: Cloud hosting is just the next level. If you ever face downtime with cloud hosting, it’s unlikely to affect all your users; that’s magic. Also, when you switch to a new host, don’t assume that your old plugins are the same ones you should use. It helps to ask your hosting provider what plugins play best with the server type, especially for caching plugins. The best caching plugin on my previous server was Litespeed; on Cloudways, Breeze plays better.
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