In the dynamic earth of electronic advertising, remaining in advance of the technological curve is vital.
This is aspect of what drives Artwork & Science, a whole-company digital agency and the winner of WP Engine’s inaugural Agency Companion Awards for “Headless Venture of the Year.”
To master extra about the ground breaking do the job Art & Science does and the particulars behind the agency’s award-profitable project, we spoke with Art & Science Specialized Director Peter Toi to appear at what is guiding his agency’s success.
Thank you, Peter, and congratulations on your Agency Associate Award. Before we get into those details, be sure to convey to us a lot more about the origins of Art & Science and its main competencies.
Art & Science began back in 2011 as The Juice Company, a electronic internet marketing organization sitting at the intersection of technique, person practical experience, and engineering innovation. We rebranded as Artwork & Science following the acquisition of a foremost Toronto-dependent Search engine optimization/PPC business in 2013. Art & Science delivers jointly the innovative inspiration of the artist with the analytical rigour of the scientist.
Over the last 13 several years, we have grown into a full-assistance digital agency. We’re happy to be Clutch’s #1 digital agency in Canada, a 2023 Google Leading Partner, and rated as one of Canada’s Leading 500 Increasing Businesses four decades in a row.
Our core competencies involve model approach, innovative promoting, site advancement, eCommerce technique, Search engine optimization, and CRO efficiency, media designs, buys and reporting, and ground breaking, experimental assignments.
How has your partnership with WP Motor impacted the agency’s growth and success?
Artwork & Science has been a member of the Company Companion Plan due to the fact 2018, but our partnership with WP Motor simply goes again a selection of yrs to when we first began employing WP Engine as our main WordPress internet hosting system. Humorous ample, I nonetheless recall the 1st time I was released to WP Motor as equally sponsor and speaker at a Toronto WordCamp several many years in the past. From that to start with interaction, I thought of WP Engine to be the gold typical of managed WordPress web hosting and they’ve lived up to my very first impressions at any time given that.
Hosting with WP Engine gives us peace of head and permits us to concentrate on places in which we carry worth, these types of as providing customers with strategic insights, artistic pondering, and making award-successful web sites. As a resourceful agency, we never automatically want to be paying out our time operating on infrastructure and handling web hosting.
At the identical time, quite a few of our solutions are hugely technical and demand help for Git workflows and pipelines, substantial-general performance CDNs and caching, and business-amount stability. WP Engine has presented us with appropriate-sized alternatives for all of our WordPress jobs.
It’s been excellent seeing WP Engine’s remedies increase with us and proceed to guidance agencies like us. Insert-ons like Smart Plugin Manager enable us to target our power on developing benefit for our clients alternatively than preserving the position quo.
The assistance we get as an agency by way of our membership in the Agency Companion Plan has totally contributed to our advancement and good results. The help we get from WP Motor, each for technological and sales support, is continuously best-notch.
The account administration and gross sales support teams have been instrumental associates on pitches, serving to to craft hosting remedies the place security, site visitors, or enterprise needs are scrutinized. Immediate entry to tier 1 guidance has also been a must have, whether or not we require efficiency profiling or other troubleshooting.
And I can say, with out hesitation, that the help from our account manager and obtain to vital members of the Atlas team was important to being in a position to make and launch the Embark website beneath tight time constraints.
Could you share insights into the Embark venture, which was a headless WordPress undertaking, and the conclusion-making behind it?
The Embark project is a fantastic instance of our entire-assistance abilities. Our consumer required to rebrand, concentrating on a new messaging platform to differentiate by itself in the RESP monetary products and services sector. This essential extensive support, including branding, campaigns, and site improvement.
With that in brain, the determination to go headless was obvious. As a modern financial services company, our client’s electronic footprint integrated a website, consumer portal, and the probable for a cell application in the long term. Headless architecture allows for the syndication of information from a one CMS to a wide range of platforms. That adaptability in written content distribution and supply was absolutely just one of the key motives we selected headless and WP Motor Atlas for this project.
Furthermore, our consumer experienced by now mentioned headless early on in the discovery system as an approach they needed us to contemplate, so it was a rather uncomplicated discussion.
The determination to use WordPress was produced mainly because it was a platform the promoting staff was acquainted with. WordPress is, of study course, ubiquitous throughout the World-wide-web and amongst advertising and marketing teams and organizations all around the environment. So familiarity, relieve of content material modifying, and the evolution of API integrations, the two RESTful and GraphQL, were being very good motives to choose WordPress.
Headless was also attractive for this task for the reason that of the elevated protection we accomplished many thanks to an API-only content answer.
WordPress—when deployed appropriately on a platform like WP Engine and handled by a growth workforce who is aware of what they are doing—is a pretty protected system. Figuring out that we’d be equipped to prohibit obtain to the backend, many thanks to delivering all material via an API, authorized us to apply supplemental safety measures, decrease the plugins, and impose stricter guidelines for improvement.
What were being some of the technical issues and triumphs in the Embark venture?
1 of the main difficulties was guaranteeing substantial general performance, which was challenging presented our four-month timeline. 4 months is restricted to construct a web-site of this sizing and complexity, and even tighter when you include things like effectiveness optimizations, information entry, and implementation of Search engine optimization and tracking. And all of this was accomplished on a relatively new system and new technology.
What stood out here was the support we acquired from WP Engine. I cannot thank our account manager ample for the lover support that was provided to us and the WP Engine technical staff we worked with. They had been instrumental in supporting us hold to our timeline and stay away from weeks of trial-and-mistake to establish best procedures and optimizations. We had immediate get in touch with with aid who ended up amazingly responsive—our accomplishment is undoubtedly owed in part to the higher level of assist we received.
This was in particular real in regards to obtaining spectacular API overall performance with < 100 millisecond response times. It was also the case as we leveraged WP Engine’s caching mechanism and WPGraphQL Smart Cache. Once we had that entire caching pipeline activated and refactored our build process and code in a way that everything was compatible, we saw an improvement of 6,000 times better performance between our first builds and our last. The site is blazing fast thanks to all of that work.
Can you tell us more about winning Headless Project of the Year? What’s the impact of this recognition?
Winning this award is a testament to our team’s hard work and dedication. It acknowledges our efforts in staying up to date with the latest in web development, reducing technical debt for our clients, and setting them up for long-term success. It’s also a recognition of our commitment to keeping our skills current and ensuring our clients receive modern solutions that help them future-proof their digital presence.
But the website is just one part of this massive undertaking. Really, the entire team at Art & Science should be recognized for the hard work they put in to ensure this project was a success.
Everyone at Art & Science–starting with the strategic and creative teams who developed a beautiful brand with a journey metaphor, to the technical teams who brought it to life, and the client services team who managed the project throughout–collaborated to make this project a success. I also want to thank Embark Student Corp. for inviting us to partner to shape the future of students on their post-secondary journey. Great visions help make great work possible.
As the technical director, I’m over the moon that we won an award for headless project of the year! We’re always adapting to changes in the technology ecosystem and environment. This is a huge validation of our efforts to adapt and innovate in our industry.
Thank you, Peter, and congratulations to Art & Science on this well-deserved award!
Find out more about WP Engine’s Agency Partner Program—the largest WordPress agency ecosystem—here, or visit WP Engine to learn more about our fully managed WordPress platform.