Creative Serum

agency Success Story

Tasks that were tedious and repetitious are long gone now with Staq

creative-serum-logo1

What made you move to Staq?

Creative Serum has gone through significant growth. We had growing pains and needed to find a solution that allowed us to better manage our WordPress client websites. We were looking for a ‘one-stop shop’ that specifically provided WordPress hosting services. In our wish list, we were also looking for something that was fast as well.

We compared SiteGround to our current hosting setup which was shared hosting at VentraIP but didn’t see any speed difference. We looked at AWS but we found the process confusing and not user friendly.

Then, a referral partner recommended Staq to us. It ticked all our boxes. When we read their website first, Staq sounded too good to be true. It ticked everything that we were looking for. So we joined.

After using the platform, not only did Staq deliver but their platform and technology far exceeded our expectations.

What was the challenge and frustrations you went through internally inside the business?

Before moving to Staq, reliability and speed was an issue. We considered moving down the route of dedicated servers, however, we were back at square 1 since it wouldn’t be an optimised and centralised solution.

Another reason that made us move to Staq was that our previous hosting company was phasing out cPanel and required us to migrate to their other plans. This was going to be challenging for us given the number of websites required to be moved plus their solution was still shared hosting. We didn’t want to be at the mercy of other users hogging up the server.

I didn’t know it was an issue at the time but as I reflect, repetitive tasks such as creating a website environment on our old hosting were taking more than 15 minutes to do whereas it takes little to no time with Staq.

We also found it difficult to apply core web vital optimisation as it requires a plethora of WordPress plugins to achieve and the results are mixed.

What feature do you love in Staq?

Everything! What we love the most is how easy it is to use. Everything is under one roof and our team’s efficiency has improved. They have automated tools that we love. For example, it used to take us up to 15 minutes to deploy a website in our old environment. Now, we have a site with our must-use plugins up and running in around 1 minute.

The deployment process of taking a website live is also simple, yet effective. We love how it automatically migrates DNS entries across with its DNS migration tool and we can select the DNS templates that will automatically add the Office365 or Gmail records with a click of a button.

Many things are just a simple click of a button. We love how we can see our client sites in one table, access everything inside each panel and use their caching and optimizer tools for core web vitals.

With core web vitals, it has given confidence to our business development manager to sell website services where we can advertise that we will get client sites into the green. Staq’s caching and optimizer tool, together with Next-Gen CDN allows us to achieve this.

Another great thing has been their support. The old hosting service also offered great support but it wasn’t focused on WordPress. Staq has a great level of knowledge of WordPress and it is reflected in their support.

Staq simply takes the headaches away. Tasks that were tedious and repetitious are long gone now.

What client success stories do you have?

We have a fresh testimonial from a client. They have seen their online leads and enquiries increase. Before this increase, we performed core web vital optimisation to the client website and deployed it to the new feature from Staq called Next-Gen CDN.

We love how we’ve made a difference in our client’s business!

Has the development and deployment of your WordPress builds improved because of Staq?

Definitely! All the reasons above suggest this.