Express Legal Funding is a trusted pre-settlement funding company and brand based in Plano, Texas. They provide essential financial support to injured and damaged plaintiffs throughout the claim and lawsuit process.
With clients relying on its non-recourse financial services during challenging times, Express Legal Funding’s website must be fast, reliable, and secure at all times. At any given time, customers may be looking for details on financial aid or want to apply online. Therefore, its website must be available 24/7/365.
In our conversation with Aaron Winston, the Strategy Director at Express Legal Funding, he shares how having a reliable Managed WordPress hosting service is essential for maintaining their clients’ trust. He also shared how they shifted from being overwhelmed by website maintenance to spending more time writing blog posts and growing their business.
Snapshot
- Industry: Pre-settlement funding
- Business size: 4 team members
The problem
Express Legal Funding previously hosted its site on Squarespace. In July 2020, Aaron shifted his focus to growing the company through SEO and content creation strategies. He realized Squarespace was not built for the top-tier level of SEO he sought to accomplish, so they needed to switch to WordPress. He then created his personal blog to improve his author E-E-A-T to aid in Express Legal Funding’s SEO efforts.
Initially, Aaron hosted his personal blog with InMotion Hosting. But it wasn’t the right choice for them. “I very quickly regretted going with Inmotion Hosting over Kinsta. So many facets of the experience were very frustrating.”
Poor technical support and site security risk
Aaron then encountered a series of troubles with their previous hosting providers. Because they couldn’t rely on the support team of these providers, they often found themselves figuring things out on their own.
“Squarespace also significantly lacked support. On multiple occasions, it took between 24 to 48 hours to hear back, and even then, the help was minimal.”
“And then, with InMotion Hosting, my personal brand website was showing up as not secure on Google Chrome. There was a lot of back-and-forth that got me nowhere. Once they identified the issue, the solution they offered was not viable, in my opinion, as I wanted to maximize the speed and trustworthiness of my site.”
Wasted resources on complex site management
The lack of reliability made managing their website a bottleneck and a source of frustration for the team. They were forced to waste hours of work sorting out tech issues and optimizing site performance – time that could have been spent on client services, content creation, and business development.
“I would dread logging into Inmotion Hosting and attempting to make changes. The infrastructure, usability, and support felt very dated. It was a time drain. The dashboard was not intuitive, and the last straw that caused me to leave was when they informed me that the SSL certificate setup was incompatible with CloudFlare. It was the right move, even though I still had two more years on the plan I already prepaid for.”
Downtime issues led to the search for a new website host
With a focus on improving Express Legal Funding’s SEO rankings, Aaron realized they couldn’t move forward with their recurring website issues with their previous hosts.
“Squarespace was always having downtime issues. Google Search Console was aware and critical of that dependability issue.”
Server downtime affects SEO. If a search engine crawls a website when it’s down, it might temporarily be de-indexed. Google has been known to crawl a site less frequently if it experiences downtime, which isn’t good for its SEO. It was time for them to look for a reliable web hosting provider.
“My main criteria for selecting a web host was SEO. I spent a couple of months researching and learning about the various ranking factors tied to web hosts. I wanted my website to rank more quickly, and I needed my web host selection to help Express Legal Funding rank at the top of the Google search results.”
The solution
Hosting may not be the most well-known component of SEO, but it’s an important one. The Express Legal Funding site needs to function well to be favored by Google, and Kinsta ensures that with Google’s top CPU servers.
With the help of the support team, moving the Express Legal Funding sites to Kinsta was easy and simple for Aaron and his team. After migrating to Kinsta, they saw a drastic improvement on their main website: “PageSpeed and Core Web vitals improved dramatically. The website has been straightforward to maintain. Google obviously trusts it, as we routinely benefit from being selected for featured snippets.”
“Kinsta’s support team was very helpful in assisting with the migration. They also solved an issue I had due to the custom theme of my personal blog that wasn’t compatible with PHP 8.0, which Kinsta required for security reasons at that time. They then helped me prevent downtime while I was switching to a new theme using Kinsta’s staging environment. Now, all the sites under my direction are running PHP 8.3.”
Powerful web architecture with Google’s fastest servers
On the infrastructure end, we utilize the latest VMS and Premium Tier network, which offers low latency and faster traffic routing by avoiding public Internet pipelines as much as possible.
At the core of Kinsta hosting is a containerized hosting stack powered by custom implementations of LXD, Nginx, MariaDB, and the latest versions of PHP. Kinsta offers a unique infrastructure that containerizes site resources so they don’t have to share and account for potential resource stealing.
Now, Express Legal Funding doesn’t have to worry about other websites potentially affecting their site’s resources and performance.
MyKinsta dashboard for easy site management
Switching from the complicated cPanel to MyKinsta was a lifesaver for Express Legal Funding. They no longer dread managing their websites.
Aaron said, “Managing our sites has become much simpler! With Kinsta, I can set it up and not worry about it. My site just runs smoothly.”
The MyKinsta dashboard gives them a quick snapshot of their WordPress sites, including monthly visits, billing details, and usage stats for disk space, the CDN, data transfer, and unique visits.
Free one-push staging environment
At Kinsta, each WordPress installation comes with its own free staging area, separate from the live site.
Aaron and his team can easily switch between their live and staging environments. The staging environment allows them to freely try out new plugins, themes, the latest PHP versions, changes to their code, and more. And once they’re ready to update their live site, it only takes one click to push all those changes.
99.9% SLA-backed uptime with 24/7/365 support
Reputation is crucial for Express Legal Funding. Clients looking for funding solutions are less apt to trust a broken site. If their site is down, it could make them seem unreliable, and potential clients might look elsewhere.
Downtime or errors can lead to missed opportunities and loss of revenue, so site issues must be quickly fixed to avoid disrupting their service and losing their clients’ trust.
Our team monitors all sites on our infrastructure 480 times a day (every three minutes) and offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If our monitoring detects that a site isn’t loading, our engineers respond quickly to restore service to the site.
Plus, having access to 24/7/365 expert support guarantees the reliability they need to offer top-notch financial services to their clients at all times.
The result
Organic traffic surge from 40 to 20,000+ monthly visitors
After migrating to Kinsta, Express Legal Funding experienced significant improvements in its website performance and SEO. While hosting isn’t often discussed as an SEO factor, moving to Kinsta boosted their rankings, traffic, and conversions. This is because Google values site speed, reliability, server uptime, and security – all of which improved when they migrated to Kinsta.
“Our website and SEO foundation are essential to our business, and having Kinsta as our web host facilitates online traffic. Most of our business growth has come after we migrated to Kinsta. Before, our SEO efforts were limited.”
Search engines like Google prioritize faster websites in their rankings because a fast load time improves the user experience. Faster sites are more likely to retain visitors as they reduce bounce rates and increase the likelihood of conversions.
“Before switching to Kinsta, we were getting about 40 organic visitors per month. Now, we are averaging over 20,000 monthly organic visitors. That’s how we generate new leads and future referrals.”
C3D server upgrade boosts speed by 27%
At Kinsta, maximizing the performance of our clients’ websites is a top priority. As a result, Express Legal Funding benefits from only the best and fastest web infrastructure on the market – a promise that Kinsta delivers on, as evidenced by the massive speed increase on their website.
“I remember being thrilled when Kinsta upgraded my hosting to use Google Cloud’s new C3D technology for free. This is just one example of how Kinsta goes above and beyond to provide the best service without extra charges.”
Until now, the best fit for Kinsta’s hosting platform was GCP’s compute-optimized C2 machines, but the introduction of C3D machines has further improved virtual machine performance through better hardware and a more efficient approach to input/output operations. This switch resulted in a 27% improvement in mobile response times for Express Legal Funding.
“Moving to C3D has made a significant difference. GTMetrix shows that our website connection time has improved. Before upgrading to C3D, the connection time on mobile was 56ms. Now it is 44ms. I am excited about this as it facilitates my SEO-focused growth strategy.”
Peace of mind with 24/7/365 expert support
Express Legal Funding is reassured to know they can always reach our team of engineers and WordPress experts anytime. Our support team is available 24/7/365, even on holidays and weekends, no matter where you are.
Plus, Kinsta doesn’t use a tiered support system, which means no frustrating escalations or transfers. Every customer gets direct access to our expert Support team, no matter what plan they’re on.
“I recommend Kinsta because it’s reliable and offers great value. You don’t have to worry about hosting your website; uptime is guaranteed. This gave me peace of mind and convinced me to upgrade my website sooner. It shows that the old advice ‘if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it’ doesn’t apply here.”
Save time with free and easy to use built-in tools
Express Legal Funding no longer has to deal with the stress of website management. Kinsta takes care of many aspects for them, such as setting up and maintaining hardware and software, providing technical support, and ensuring their content management system (CMS) is up to date and functioning smoothly. Tools such as the MyKinsta dashboard, Kinsta Staging, and the APM tool empower them to focus more on reaching their business goals.
“Moving forward, we plan to continue to leverage Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting as we create new and original content for our company website and blog.”
“Also, as we work on creating a more modern, updated look and feel for our website, Kinsta’s premium staging environment will be very helpful. It allows us to get accurate PageSpeed scores before pushing the site live, further protecting our SEO effort.”
The conclusion
Express Legal Funding significantly increased its monthly organic traffic from 40 to an impressive 20,000 average site visits. Key to this growth was the boost in site speed – critical for SEO – along with the ease of managing their site and access to 24/7 support. In addition, their recent upgrade to Google Cloud Platform C3D machines resulted in a 27% increase in mobile site speed, building on the improvements they saw after moving to Kinsta.
Now, they can focus more on growing Express Legal Funding by improving SEO and creating new content, free from worrying about website issues.
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