Zelros’s Site Performance Jumps by 30% with Pantheon on WordPress

Zelros provides B2B insurance software to help insurers offer real-time product recommendations across channels. The French startup has been working on making its low-code AI platform faster and smarter for a few years in Europe. When the time came to expand to North America, Zelros brought in a new chief marketing officer to work on the region that accounts for more than 37% market share in global Insurtech. 

Linh Ho, then-CMO and now Chief Growth Officer at Zelros, took over the company’s site in the first six months on the job and empowered her team to achieve extraordinary results. In the first quarter of 2022, Zelros.com saw a 45% increase in web traffic year-over-year followed by 82% in the second quarter. Ho’s lean marketing team accelerated their pipeline growth and contributed to over 60% of the sales pipeline.

Ho says Pantheon was instrumental to their success. Here’s how the Zelros marketing team partnered with Pantheon on website operations and freed their developer team to work on product enhancements. 

Our website is critical to our business, brand and overall customer experience. We chose Pantheon for its quick time to value, cost-effective approach and customer service excellence.

- Linh Ho, Chief Growth Officer at Zelros 

Challenge: Marketing at the Back of the Queue 

Zelros’s development team was responsible for both their insurance software and the website. With product always being a priority, many marketing requests – from building new landing pages to adding a chatbot – would often take a back seat. 

In addition, Zelros’s legacy provider did not have a staging environment, so marketing hands were tied when it came to testing new content features. 

Because Zelros relies on its website to drive leads and nurture brand loyalty, the executive team decided to make marketing in charge of the website and everything that goes with it, from web hosting and security to development and content updates. The company’s four-person marketing team chose to migrate the website to a new server to free up their development team. And this is how their journey on Pantheon began.

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No Technical Background? No Problem! 

Post-migration support was particularly critical for Zelros’s Digital Marketing Manager, Lê Nguyen, who would take point on managing the website. After talking with the Pantheon team, she was confident she’d succeed even without a background in setting up and maintaining a hosting infrastructure.  

I was worried about handling everything on my own, especially setting up development environments and testing different plug-ins and themes for the website. However, with Pantheon’s Support team handling my non-technical questions with great patience, I was able to handle everything myself easily.

- Lê Nguyen, Digital Marketing Manager at Zelros

Zelros migrated its WordPress website to the Pantheon platform shortly after its new CMO took over. Nguyen described the process as “simple and straightforward, with absolutely no hiccups.”

The Pantheon platform enables the marketing team to experiment with new website features and iterate with confidence. Dev, Test, Live, the continuous integration workflow, gives Nguyen the ability to preview and test code in separate environments and ensure there are no back-end issues before pushing them live. 

“Previously, there were always hiccups and the risk of breaking website pages if we wanted to implement new plugins or update WordPress versions. But now, with separate environments, I feel free to experiment and check page performance before updating or deploying new plugins, themes, etc.,” Nguyen explained.

Nguyen enjoys the freedom to experiment with a new page builder using Multidev capabilities, which speeds up development without impacting the website’s performance. For example, Zelros runs many email and advertising campaigns to support organic traffic, but their website pages weren’t optimized for mobile devices. Nguyen can now create pages from scratch in Multidev and quickly iterate them to enable a fresher, more responsive, user-friendly experience for mobile users.

Results: 30% Increase in Page Load Speed and More

Shortly after migrating to Pantheon, Zelros experienced a 30% increase in page load speeds and an uplift in organic traffic. The company attributes this astounding jump to the high-performance infrastructure built into the Pantheon platform and the back-end system cleanup by their team. Nine months into her job as CMO, Ho reported a 190% lift in the US traffic growth and 82% growth in global web traffic. 

Pantheon’s support team has been integral in easing any digital marketing team post-migration worries. Right after the migration, Nguyen wanted to test their new WebOps workflows. At 1:00 am Paris time, she called Pantheon’s support with a question about how to test and implement GDPR compliance cookie banners using plugins and Google Tag Manager without impacting the live site.“I didn’t have the technical knowledge to perform this operation. Pantheon’s support team spent several hours walking me through the process,” Nguyen recalled. “They sent me the right documentation and waited while I read it to make sure I understood what to do and how to do it. This support gave me peace of mind to do something I’d never done before.”

Pantheon support and the website’s stability and performance freed Zelros’s marketing team to focus on innovative growth marketing programs. Now they can confidently test new ideas to improve organic traffic and website conversions that drive business growth.

We’re excited about the new possibilities we have on Pantheon. Part of a marketer’s job is going through trial and error and learning what works best. Pantheon creates, literally, the environment for us to do that.

- Lê Nguyen, Digital Marketing Manager at Zelros