The Confetti Bar Celebrates Better Site Speed, Traffic

TheConfettiBar.com isn’t just an ordinary site. Dedicated to creating joy and spreading smiles around their community, co-owner Cliff Huizenga explained, “we want to do more than just sell confetti. It’s our mission to inspire, connect and uplift the creative community one little bit of happiness at a time.”

Upon creation, rather than going for a boring and flat design, TheConfettiBar.com opted for unique features and functionalities to spur business growth and community engagement — features like a custom confetti page.

However, with small business growth, a powerful backend is required that can handle large amounts of site visitors.

WP Engine is all about dealing with the back end messes, so that you can focus on running your site — and your business — from the front end.” – Cliff Huizenga, co-owner of The Confetti Bar.

Being both a business owner and backend developer was out of the question for Huizenga, who pointed out that managing the site himself was a time-killer. He therefore decided to switch the site to a managed WordPress hosting provider (one that was not WP Engine).

But when TheConfettiBar.com went down for 10 days straight, Huizenga knew there needed to be a drastic change.

According to Huizenga, the hosting provider he decided on originally did not accept the SSL certificate he had purchased, and he therefore had to spend 700 percent more on a new SSL.

“When they went to install it, the site broke down and became inaccessible and we lost 10 days of sales,” explained Huizenga. “And when the site did come back online, it was sluggish at best.”

Huizenga then decided that there needed to be a change in hosting providers. He said he chatted with the WP Engine sales team and determined WP Engine’s platform was a better fit for The Confetti Bar’s site.

“WP Engine’s support team was able to install our old SSL certificate — they had us online and speedy within 15 minutes,” said Huizenga.

The importance of choosing a hosting provider was clear to Huizenga, who wanted to focus on his business and the front end of his site, rather than the backend business.

“We needed an actual managed hosting provider,” he said. “Other services say they’re managed, but leave you in a support queue when you need them most or, worse, they tell you that what you need is out of scope of their managed support.”

Moving to WP Engine not only improved the speed of the site, but also helped increase the monthly site visit count, Huizenga said.

“With our old hosting provider, the max amount of users we’d get to the site would be no greater than 5,000 per month. Since switching to WP Engine, our lowest monthly visit count is at 5,000,” said Huizenga.

Aside from site growth and speedy site performance, the change also allowed the business to implement one of its biggest customer feature requests — an interactive customizable order form.

“Instead of inquiries with many emails back and forth before invoicing the customer, they’re now able to customize, upload assets, and pay for their custom confetti before we even see the request. This speeds up production time on our end, allows us to take in more orders, and weeds out on-the-fence window shoppers,” said Huizenga.

He concluded, “Conversions are key, and we believe WP Engine’s fast hosting and caching of assets helps with that positive interaction with customers.”

Want to read more stories from WP Engine customers? Each weekday in November we’ll unveil a new customer story as part of our WP Engine Customer Spotlight series.