Drift Lands 25% Increase in Organic Sessions with Pantheon

Drift, the Conversational Cloud company, has a Cinderella story to tell. In the last five years, it quadrupled its website traffic and grew its business tenfold. 

Their transformation journey started with a simple chatbot removing friction between buyers and sellers on a website. The B2B buying process was broken for many companies and Drift took on the challenge. 

Sluggish Website Blocks Sales Pipeline

Responding to the growing market need, Drift was ready to scale fast. But due to an exponential growth in traffic, its website would go down or slow to a crawl almost weekly. 

“We wanted people to come to our site and have the best buying experience they’ve ever had,” said Caitlin Seele, Head of Digital Marketing. “Our website touches every deal, so it must be fast and stable.” That’s how the company came to evaluate Pantheon for its flagship site on WordPress.

As every Cinderella story goes, one must first struggle with routine tasks and overcome many difficulties to make it to the big leagues. Drift’s legacy web hosting provider was better suited to serve small companies. “Our main issue was downtime and unstable performance. They just didn't have much in terms of dedicated servers, support or developer tools,” said Seele. 

As a result, in addition to a lack of confidence in stability, the digital team couldn’t serve the growing company's needs to test new features and personalize buying experiences. Marketing needed help hitting their goals for a better quality pipeline, higher revenue and happy customers.

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Enter Pantheon

Fixing downtime was first on the list. By 2022, Drift’s website traffic grew to 16 million sessions per year. Losing even a fraction of that traffic due to a slow-loading page was a blow to the bottom line. Pantheon delivered the fastest possible page loads backed by a 99.99% uptime SLA, and soon the company’s stability concerns were a thing of the past.

Next came productivity. To keep up with Drift’s fast growth, Pantheon armed the company’s digital marketing, creative and dev teams with tools and resources to build new features, A/B test and launch without any waiting time. 

WordPress on Pantheon makes it really easy for us to make things work for people with varying levels of development experience. We have a mix of backend developers and marketers who need the ability to edit our website at any given time. So WordPress on Pantheon struck the right balance for us in enabling our developers to strengthen the site while empowering our marketers to continue making content changes in WordPress. 

- Caitlin Seele, Head of Digital Marketing, Drift

Pantheon’s Multidev feature allowed Drift to create multiple environments and work in parallel on different tasks. For example, Seele’s team can now work on ambitious new components for landing pages without getting in the way of more routine day-to-day updates or having to scramble priorities when a security update is needed.

“For us, the key has always been speed. Our website is essentially a demo of our product. Things like Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN have really sped us up across the board and that was really what we needed – a stable site that’s constantly evolving, handling a much larger volume of traffic than we've had in the past,” shared Seele. 

Increased Traffic, Lower Bounce Rates Fuel Marketing Campaigns

Drift’s marketing team cares about all the usual metrics that high-performing enterprises track: sessions, page speed insights and bounce rates rank in the top three. 

After six months on Pantheon, Drift recorded nearly a 25% increase in organic sessions. Thanks to an improved user experience — core page speed as well as continuous conversion rate optimization from the marketing team — the bounce rate decreased by 15%.

Drift likes to look deeper than Google Analytics data to understand what fuels or hampers web traction. Pantheon’s integration with New Relic provides performance monitoring that helps explain and improve conversion rates. Pantheon’s tools drill down to find out which specific modules or plugins may be slowing things down. 

In yesterday’s world, this detective work was a developer’s job. But for companies that embrace the WebOps culture, it takes two to tango.  

“Ever since the shift to a remote-first work environment, we all live in some combination of hybrid work. Customers more than ever are going to your website as their primary source of truth,” said Seele.

No matter what area of marketing you're in, you need to think about how you're creating compelling journeys on your website. Marketers should be more involved when it comes to things like landing page testing and design. Having a good relationship with your WebOps resource can help you understand how to take the web experience behind a campaign to the next level, and also how the speed of your site impacts user experience and conversions.

- Caitlin Seele, Head of Digital Marketing, Drift

An ROI on that level – combining the technical and the creative – enables companies to build trust with their customers and become industry leaders. In Drift’s experience, the WebOps payoff is instant growth. 

“Drift measures everything,” said Ottavio Dattolo, Senior Global Demand Generation Manager at Drift. “My job is to break down the funnel into five stages and get customers to move through it after their initial consideration.” But in this market’s economy, “we have to learn how to do less better, how to optimize and convert.” Pantheon enabled Drift to move fast, be agile and customize extensively.