Digital Skyrocket builds websites for local businesses that want to outrank their competitors on Google. They moved to Kinsta to speed up their websites. They got that, and a lot more. Check out our interview below with Chad Barnes, the head honcho of Digital Skyrocket.
About Digital Skyrocket
“I built my first website back in 2009. When we migrated our websites to Kinsta in 2017, our portfolio included mom-and-pop local businesses, multi-thousand-product e-commerce stores, and 500,000 visitors/mo super-blogs. Since moving to Kinsta, the number of support tickets we receive from our clients has plummeted because their websites just work. And that’s the way we like it.”
Finding a New Hosting Provider
“Slow websites drive me nuts. And my impatience with slow load times has infected the rest of our team. So, we compress images, pinpoint and troubleshoot slow plugins, identify and kill unnecessary scripts, etc.
But even our best efforts can’t overcome bad hosting. So, after reading reviews and testing personally, we opted years ago for one of WP Engine’s Premium plans, which provided stellar page load speeds… for a while.
As the number of sites on our dedicated server increased, every site on our server began to slow down. Over time, our blisteringly fast page load speeds became nothing of the sort. When we discussed the problem with WP Engine, they told us that doubling our plan would only be a short-term solution. Tripling would soon be required.
Doubling was beyond our budget, and tripling was just not an option.
As we started researching web hosting options, we stumbled across a name we had never heard: Kinsta. And everywhere we found that name, people were raving about page load speed. Of course, that’s what we wanted, but there were some benefits to WP Engine that we knew we couldn’t lose. In particular, we loved the ease of their dashboard and the expertise of their support team.
So, we made a list of every feature in the WP Engine dashboard (yes, we’re those people—we noted every single one) and dug up some of our most involved support conversations with WP Engine. Jon (patiently) talked me through each feature and support conversation, and though still reluctant, we decided to give it a try.”
Migrating to Kinsta
“We hired Kinsta’s team to migrate all 100+ websites. To quickly lighten the load on our WP Engine server through the migration process, Kinsta first migrated our largest sites. The first was a 500,000+ visitors/mo blog, the second was a several-thousand-product e-commerce site, and the third was a resource hog that came to us with over 50 plugins (yikes, I know!). Here’s what we found:
Site #1: 15% page load speed improvement — down from 1.38s to 1.17s
Site #2: 81% page load speed improvement — down from 8.91s (yes, it had gotten that bad) to 1.71s
Site #3: 52% page load speed improvement — down from 3.48s to 1.69s
Still skeptical, I assumed, as WP Engine told me, that those improvements happened because our WP Engine server still had ~100 websites, while our new Kinsta account only had 3 websites.
But that wasn’t the case. The shocker (to me, anyway) was that those three sites continued to perform at that level even after all 100+ sites had been migrated to our Kinsta account.
So, when we migrate existing websites to our Kinsta account, we guarantee faster page load speeds, even when they opt out of our performance optimization services. And so far, we’ve never lost on that guarantee.”
Support Surpasses the Competition
“Kinsta immediately won me over with their website performance, but I had serious reservations about losing WP Engine support. After all, WP Engine’s tech support team is internationally recognized, and we saw why. Their support techs were helpful, efficient, and available 24/7 by phone, email, or chat. So, moving to a chat-only support company with no international support awards was concerning, to say the least.
We’ve now been with Kinsta for more than 8 years, and their tech support doesn’t just meet, but legitimately exceeds what we got (and at the time really enjoyed!) from WP Engine. With super-low problem-to-solution times and competence for days, we haven’t experienced support at this level from any company of any kind, including award winners like WP Engine and Apple. No kidding.”
Managing more than 100 websites carries the potential for overwhelming tech support issues. The switch to Kinsta cut our support ticket volume in half because the websites we build just work. They’re live, fast, secure, and (expertly) supported. And they stay that way. We’re free to master what we do because Kinsta is masterful at what they do. That’s why, second only to our salaries, Kinsta is our company’s least negotiable expense.”
Chad Barnes
Head Honcho at Digital Skyrocket
