Decisely’s Developer Gains 5x Efficiency on WordPress with Pantheon

Decisely is an HR tech platform providing small to medium-sized businesses with tools to help them manage benefits ranging from healthcare to retirement. Think benefits for thousands of employees of hotels, fast food chains and real estate companies. All serviced by one web developer.

In six years, Brittany Rapheal, Decisely’s Senior Web Developer, took her company’s online presence from one site to 150. Standardizing with WordPress on Pantheon saved Decisely from hiring more web developers. The platform's WebOps tools ended Rapheal’s daily time sink of finding workarounds and stressing about updates taking her sites down. Rapheal gained confidence and time to focus solely on her clients and has a great WebOps growth story to tell.

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The Challenge of Growing From One to 150 Sites on WordPress

Rapheal joined Decisely when it had only one website. The lead-generating flagship site was hosted on GoDaddy. As the company grew so did their online presence. One site suddenly became two, three, then a dozen – all built from the ground up. “It wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” recalled Rapheal.  “I’ve worked with WordPress Multisite in the past so I knew that would be a better solution because every time I had to make a change to a site, I wouldn’t have to make it 10 times on 10 different sites.” 

Decisely’s GoDaddy days were clearly over. Rapheal switched to WPEngine and used WordPress to tackle the challenge of creating benefits pages for organizations, group and sole proprietor benefits, among other programs. But WPEngine only took Rapheal so far. Soon Decisely was hosting over 150 websites, and Rapheal was again on the hunt for enterprise-level support and developer tools. 

“What really triggered the switch was the lack of support. Despite being with a WordPress-centric hosting company, there were a lot of platform limitations. They only offered staging and dev environments for single sites. I had a Multisite, which meant I couldn’t test anything before launching, except for our main site,” said Rapheal. A cold email from Pantheon arrived just in time to pique her interest. 

Multidev to the Rescue

At the time, Rapheal reported to the marketing team. A UI/UX designer and web developer with a marketing background, she wanted to serve her colleagues better and launch new features to help the company scale. Instead, she was spending days trying to find workarounds to avoid breaking things in live environments. 

“The biggest help so far has been the Multidev environments hands down,” said Rapheal. Pantheon's Multidev environments are true cloud instances cloned on-demand from the live site, complete with their own URLs. Multidev lets developers start a new ambitious project, or a few quick-fix projects, in separate environments, each based on the live site. The best part is what works in a Pantheon Multidev environment will work in production. 

Pantheon's Multidev has been a game-changer. Prior to Multidev, when we were on WPEngine, I had to make an update and pray that it wouldn't take down all 150 of our sites that are connected. Because I was literally pushing everything directly to our live sites. And that's terrifying.”

- Brittany Rapheal, Senior Web Developer at Decisely

Pantheon’s Multidev also serves as a point of online collaboration between stakeholders. Decisely’s marketing team has recently put this feature to use by designing an A/B test for a client’s homepage. “The Multidev environments have given us the ability to work together with different teams and made collaboration and communication more efficient,” said Rapheal. 

Pantheon’s enterprise-grade security features strengthened Decisely’s security posture. A vulnerability discovered on WPEngine, which has been left unaddressed for months by the legacy provider, is now getting taken care of at Pantheon. 

No Longer Alone

Rapheal’s story from running one site to growing the portfolio to 150 in six years is nothing short of impressive. The tech industry is known for its wear-multiple-hats work descriptions, and web developers are not an exception to that hiring algorithm. What helps their work along the way is WebOps practices that improve productivity and drive results. 

With Pantheon’s WebOps platform, I have an extension of my team of one. I am no longer alone. I’m at least five times more efficient and have the WordPress support I need. With tools like Multidev, I no longer have to look for workarounds that would sometimes take me days or weeks. Pantheon has something for everyone and I am sure I'm going to be finding things on Pantheon until the day I die!

- Brittany Rapheal, Senior Web Developer at Decisely