Case study
An alternative to WordPress
For over 25 years, Eflow has provided regulatory compliance solutions to the financial services industry. With over 100 clients across five different continents, providing both buy-side and sell-side firms with fast, efficient software designed to keep them compliant in this ever-changing global regulatory landscape. Eflow offerings include post-trade surveillance, best execution and transaction cost analysis, custom and bespoke regulatory reporting, transaction reporting, MiFID II record keeping, etc. So, when Charlie approached us in 2020 to make his company’s website faster, we knew that it needed a super professional touch.
Problem
After auditing the website for page speed and performance, we found that some huge uncompressed assets slowed down page load. At this stage, the website took 15.4 seconds to load in its entirety. As a result, we bulk optimised all assets, minimised scripts and CSS, and moved all assets to a reputable CDN provider. However, repeated testing showed that despite our best efforts at optimisation, the hosting for this WordPress.com site was well below par. On one of our tests, there was a lag of 7 seconds before the server responded. As a result of this 7 seconds lag, we had to move the entire website to a decent hosting, and we had to act fast! The slow page speed was doing the Eflow a great disservice. As this was a wordpress.com site rather than a wordpress.org site, we couldn’t just move the WordPress installation to a new server. It would essentially require a complete rebuild, and as the website needed a design refresh anyway, we proposed that a JAMstack site would give Eflow the performance it hoped to achieve. In addition, we were confident that our sub-second page speed guarantee would shift the dial for their main marketing channel.
Solution
Being a Jamstack website development company, we proposed overhauling their website using jamstack methodologies to improve site speed and make updating the website seamlessly smooth. You can find out more about Jamstack as a Wordpress alternative in our article about the best alternatives to WordPress in 2023. So, in 2021 Charlie took the plunge and commissioned us to redesign and rebuild their company website eflowglobal.com as a JAMstack website. As no payment processing was required, we used the Hugo Static Site Generator for its swift build times. Ihsan, our UX/UI designer, came up with a great modern bespoke UI which Charlie loved. As we developed the pages so thoughtfully designed by Ihsan, we connected each one up to Forestry.io as the Content Management System so that Charlie and his team could edit the content with ease. The main conversion goal was to book a call, so we decided to rely on the Calendly API for booking. This allowed for a faster load time for the website, contributing to the excellent 96% performance score for eflowglobal.com.
Core web vitals
Over the previous 28-day collection period, the aggregate experience of all pages served from this origin passes the Core Web Vitals assessment.
What we learnt
As much as we developed a website that met our client’s needs, we will not try to fix a ‘broken wheel.’ Instead, we will immediately transition to a JAMstack website after analysing a slow website not built on Jamstack, saving time and resources for both our clients and us. Our bespoke JAMstack website for Eflow global will drastically reduce the user bounce rate, allowing the users to make better decisions, which will generate more revenue for Eflow global.
What they thought of us
Our experience with BugleLab has been a very positive one. They helped us switch from our old buggy WordPress site to a much faster static site. They also helped set us up with a new CMS which allowed us to retain flexibility and the ability to implement new content easily without the need for a developer’s input. BugleLab didn’t just build our site, they gave us the tools we needed to be in control of it.
