OppFi, a publicly-traded company, is a leading financial technology platform that powers banks to help everyday consumers gain access to credit. With over 700,000 OppLoans customers, OppFi earned a spot on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ North America for 2021.

WordPress woes

OppFi operates several WordPress websites to support its marketing efforts. Certain aspects of running these sites became pain points for the SEO and DevOps teams that deal with the sites on a daily basis:

Deployment and DevOps complications

Because the sites were under the technical management of OppFi’s DevOps team, deploying new functionality required their involvement. However, the demands of their mission-critical main application responsibilities made it difficult to develop and troubleshoot the WordPress PHP.

Security

The DevOps team was always uncomfortable with the fact that WordPress was running in its native format given the inherent security risks. In addition, the sites were hosted within the company’s cloud infrastructure and were therefore tightly intertwined with their main applications. To mitigate the threat, the WordPress sites needed to adopt complicated security and compliance mechanisms to protect themselves and the adjacent applications. The implementations often slowed the SEO team’s ability to deploy changes quickly and broke the sites! These experiences were incredibly frustrating for all involved.

Speed

Despite tremendous efforts to optimize the sites for speed, the teams were never satisfied with their performance. At over 9 seconds per page load, the team knew they were losing in terms of rankings, conversion rates, and general customer satisfaction.

Moving to Strattic

OppFi’s web agency learned about Strattic and suggested it might solve many of the company’s pain points around WordPress site management. After thorough consideration, OppFi decided to test Strattic on one site.

The results astounded everyone, including the DevOps team.

Speed improved 500%

After moving to Strattic, website page speed improved tremendously, from over 9 seconds to just over 1 second per page. The team knew this would have a significant impact on rankings and leads but were amazed to see the extent and impact of the results.

In addition, the SEO team found that after moving to Strattic, Google bots understood the site better because of the faster load time, which extended their crawl budget and led to faster and better indexing.

Strattic’s impact on improving organic traffic made a direct impact on OppFi’s bottom line: improved performance translated quickly into more traffic, which increased leads and conversions.

Pre-migration

Post-migration

Simplified DevOps, WebOps, and workflows

After moving to Strattic, the SEO team was pleased to see that they could move faster in terms of deploying updates and content to the site. Changes that used to take weeks or months to deploy due to complicated workflows and coordination between teams are now almost instant. With Strattic, the SEO and Marketing teams can set up new sites to support new businesses within two weeks; a record pace for OppFi!

OppFi marketing websites are updated regularly. This process is easier now because the sites are housed in the same place. Previously, OppFi maintained different environments for each site, but with Strattic’s modular system the updates are easy to deploy.

OppFi also appreciates Strattic’s Preview functionality: a static staging environment where they can deploy first to ensure that changes made on the WordPress site are compatible with the static version of the site.

For large-scale corporations like OppFi, the Preview static site allows them to submit working versions of pages for other teams to review and approve before they are pushed live – another example of how Strattic can streamline workflows.

Thanks to Strattic, the SEO and Marketing teams can now move quickly and independently to bring results to the company.

“After moving to Strattic, we saw improvements on every front: speed, SEO, security, and workflow. Without the noise of managing a live WordPress site, our teams can focus on our core responsibilities with confidence knowing that Strattic, and their amazing customer success team, is behind us.”
– Harrison Kuo

Security that allows them to sleep at night

As mentioned, tying the marketing sites to the company’s applications created a lot of discomfort and fear. Now that the WordPress sites operate in a different environment, the DevOps team feels more confident in the company’s overall security posture. They also love that the site is deployed as “flat” html because it means there is no underlying processing server or code that can potentially be breached. In addition, DevOps was always concerned with the open source nature of WordPress, and felt that the legacy servers were unreliable. By moving to Strattic, DevOps can sleep at night knowing that the “noise” of managing WordPress has been taken off their plate.

Success with Strattic!

Migrating the WordPress sites to Strattic helped OppFi realize immediate and lasting improvements in site speed and security. The efficiencies that Strattic provides in streamlining workflow and autonomy for the SEO team have been invaluable.