About Resident
Resident is one of the fastest growing eCommerce retailers in North America, with revenue over $250m in 2019. They started their journey selling high-quality mattresses online and quickly expanded to other home furnishings, with multiple brands including the award-winning Nectar, DreamCloud, Awara, Level Sleep, Wovenly and Bundle.
[Fun fact: Did you know that the average person spends 26 years of their lifetime asleep?! Okay, fine, I’m convinced – a good mattress is important.]
Challenges finding the right platform for their WordPress websites
Resident runs several WordPress sites that are critical to their marketing strategy. However, maintaining and securing them was a time-consuming never-ending headache, and extremely stressful.
“We started thinking more and more about security in the WordPress context because, unfortunately, If you don’t constantly maintain WordPress you end up having security issues. I’m not interested in maintaining WordPress – I don’t have the bandwidth and it’s not my core focus at all,” explains Pavel Eliav, Head of DevOps at Resident.
Resident looked towards the premium WordPress hosting providers to ease their pain, but after trying them out found themselves struggling with stability issues and deployment workflows that didn’t work for their needs.
“First, we tried a well-known managed WordPress hosting provider, where we experienced significant stability issues. Their suggestion for fixing this was to pay them more money, which was a red flag for us. Then we moved to a more premium managed WordPress hosting provider. We had heard a lot of good things about them but they didn’t fit our needs. For example, the deployment from QA to production was basically overriding anything that was on production with QA values. It just didn’t work for us.”
Removing the worry from WordPress by going static
At that point Pavel started looking for a more comprehensive solution, ideally one that would remove WordPress from the equation altogether, while keeping marketing happy with a WordPress website they can use as usual.
When Resident learned about Strattic, Pavel felt that it was a very promising direction for them.
“It was very important for us to have WordPress out of the equation when it comes to security, and Strattic accomplishes that by completely disconnecting the WordPress site from the public-facing static site” Pavel shares. “Also, we really like the fact that the WordPress container itself spins up and down. It seems so obvious once you have it in place.”
Beyond the maintenance of WordPress, Pavel confided that what really kept him up at night (yes, I know, couldn’t resist a sleep pun) was the uncertainty around being able to handle a DDoS attack.
Pavel explains. “For me, the most interesting aspect was the security of the infrastructure. Funny story: since moving to Strattic, we had a DDoS attack on one of our sites, and it didn’t affect anything! No response time issues. No stability issues. Nothing. It was like it just blew right over us and we didn’t feel a thing. This was a big deal for us.”
A side (table) of static and CDN speed and performance
Once the WordPress security and maintenance concerns were resolved, Resident could start to enjoy the speed benefits of Strattic.
“Even though security is business-critical, we really love the other benefits of having a static site on a CDN, like the speedy performance of our site”, says Pavel. “Our WordPress-powered marketing content plays a major role in driving users to our eCommerce sites and converting them to customers. Every second counts when delivering content in terms of lowering bounce rates and increasing conversion rates. On Strattic, the prerendered static pages are fast out of the box, without having to change one line of code.”
Keep on being a powerhouse!
It took some time for Resident to find Strattic, but we are so happy they did 🙂
We are honored to be working with such an incredible powerhouse of an eCommerce company and are delighted to have a small part in their online success. We are proud to ensure that the Resident team can sleep at night and can confidently put their worries aside in order to focus on selling their beloved mattresses.
in Jerusalem, Israel