From WordPress to Duda: Websites that load 4x faster
Brazilian medical marketing agency Future Marketing had an expensive and complicated website building process using WordPress. Since 2018, with Duda, the agency has been delivering websites that perform better and are built in 1/3 of the time.
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4x
Websites that load 4x faster
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1/3
Built in 1/3 of the time
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Require smaller teams
Building scalable websites for the healthcare segment
The greatest challenge for the Brazilian medical marketing agency Future Marketing was scaling its website building business.
Founded in 2014, the agency specializes in marketing services for physicians, clinics and other healthcare providers.
"It used to be that we would create a website on WordPress and a week later it already required 19 updates, 3 new versions of WordPress, 2 incompatibilities, 3 design bugs that did not exist before and 9 pending integrations," says Pedro Barbieri, founder of Future Marketing.
In 2018, the agency switched to using Duda exclusively as their platform for building new websites. It is now inviting all its customers to migrate their sites to Duda.
"Duda is easy to use and delivers great site performance. Easy maintenance, constant updating without the need to deal with servers," explains Filipe Cipolla, Director of Operations at Future Marketing.
Agency and clinic working together
Founded as a 360º digital marketing agency, Future Marketing started working in the medical segment in 2016. That same year it started providing services to the Alira Clinic, which specializes in women's health.
In a short time, the agency and the clinic identified several synergies that motivated the partnership of both companies.
As a result, Future Marketing became an agency that specializes in the health sector, exclusively serving clinics, physicians and other companies that operate in this segment.
Their services include branding, website creation, medical marketing management, content marketing and patient experience. More than 50 clients are served on a recurring basis.
Future Marketing's portfolio also includes over 150 websites and visual identities for companies and healthcare industry professionals.
"We have a very lean and optimized structure. With 11 employees we deliver high quality services in the shortest time possible," explains founder Pedro Barbieri.
The challenges of scaling with WordPress
Since its inception, the agency has built websites on WordPress, but faced many scaling challenges.
"We were solving problems all the time. We had to hire people, plugins, etc. We spent a fortune on a server that didn't work. It was necessary to create each of the accounts, themes, and pay individual licenses for each site. The process was expensive and complicated," says Operations Director Filipe Cipolla.
Difficulties with WordPress included:
- Construction problems
- Plugin issues (price, incompatibility, update)
- Own hosting required
- High time spent on maintenance
- Server problems (price and maintenance)
"For a while, the site performed very well, it was fast, responsive, everything was fine. But then the problems would start showing up and in two months the website would be obsolete," summarizes Pedro Barbieri.
According to the founder of Future Marketing, they also discovered that there were still hidden costs that had not even been foreseen in the project, such as premium plugins and other paying solutions.
In 2018, the agency was introduced to Duda. The COO's concerns were support, stability, volume of updates, and new features – but these objections were soon overcome.
"Duda delivers what it promises"
Thanks to Duda, Future Marketing was able to build extremely agile and scalable processes for building websites.
With WordPress, the process involved several teams and several steps:
- Step #1 - Design team which created the layout
- Step #2 - Developer who turned layout into programming
- Step #3 - Content team which produced texts in Google Docs as they could not login without the risk of breaking some of the code
- Step #4 - Designer or developer who uploaded the content
With Duda, the entire team works directly on the platform. Future Marketing no longer needs to rely on developers' time.
How the new process works with Duda:
- A design team develops the website based on team sections that have already been created to meet the needs of Future Marketing's medical clients.
- A content team inserts texts and videos.
The fact that Future Marketing has a specific niche of the market – the healthcare sector – allowed the agency to map the highest standards for websites in this segment.
The ability to understand what are the key elements for these clients and what really matters for a physician's website or a medical clinic to convert more patients is what sets it apart.
Thus, it created team sections within Duda that allow the process to be streamlined and scaled.
"We know that it is not feasible for everything to happen at the same time, but Duda delivers what it promises and is in constant development and improvement," says Filipe Cipolla.
Websites that load 4x faster
On WordPress, the best Future Marketing sites had a 3.5 to 4 second load time and that was already considered excellent. No website loaded in less than 3 seconds.
With Duda, it is rare for a website to take longer than 1.5 seconds to load.
"We have sites where the appearance of the first fold, which is what matters in terms of usability, is below 1 second. In other words, we are delivering a site that is 97.2% faster than all other sites in Brazilian internet. And this is very relevant," explains Pedro Barbieri.
Website construction time has also been drastically reduced. Whereas before the agency took 56 to 60 hours to build a website, today it delivers a new website in just 14 to 19 hours of work.
"We make a website in a third of the time and in a better quality," concludes Barbieri.
According to Filipe Cipolla, the feedback from the team and customers is excellent. "Customers praise the performance and the team praises the ease of use of the platform."
