WordStream

A Drupal site can be simple to use, easy to customize, beautifully responsive, and flexible enough to scale up without going down and crashing. To meet the needs of a growing organization, a Drupal site enables businesses through easy content admin experiences and a powerfully built business tool.

WordStream, a digital marketing and advertising software company serving over one million advertisers (and with a freshly launched Drupal 8 website), can attest to all of these Drupal wins.

Available to all

“The new site allows for guest authors to have access to specific pieces, and the overall brand presence is reinforced throughout the site”

Drupal 8 makes it easy to manage multiple user accounts, allowing for many users to easily add to a blog community

A company blog is often a top traffic element of a website and, in the case of WordStream, is comprised of company and guest blogger insights alike. Unfortunately, uploading guest blog posts can get tricky, as the role of a guest blogger in a CMS needs permission settings somewhere between “can add and edit their own post” and “can’t access or change the main site”. Drupal 8 does a phenomenal job of easily controlling access management by allowing for numerous guest user accounts to be set up. These users have the ability to add a blog post and to upload and play with the copy of the text (editing paragraphs and text), but not the ability to change the company website layout, such as header styles, or layouts and corporate colors. Guest user accounts are also restricted from being able to make changes to the main live site, ensuring that while guests can add to portions of the site, they cannot alter the “core” of WordStream’s site.

Powerfully built

“Since launching, we’ve had record traffic reach, beating previous highs! We’ve also been experiencing intense traffic spikes, and the server’s been able to scale up and down with these spikes”

In addition to Drupal’s ability to create easy content admin experience and simple permissions management, the CMS is also incredibly scalable. During the release of the WordStream website, WordStream announced its acquisition by Gannett Co, resulting in spikes of thousands of visitors flocking to their website. Because of the strength and robust nature of the CMS, Drupal was able to accommodate the influx of site visitors without affecting the site’s performance (the site’s load times and overall speed), and without going down and crashing. Furthermore, Drupal’s power and scalability allowed for the WordStream website to attain a record increase in traffic reach, with integrations allowing them to rank much higher in organic search, and beat previous traffic records highs!

Easy to use

“The site allows us to make edits faster and it responds to content changes quickly; we can now iterate and create content much more rapidly”

Allowing editors to easily change out text or add new elements to pages is another win of Drupal 8

Drupal 8 allows for content admins to easily access a code-free backend of a website, and change up the way that content is presented in a matter of clicks. In Drupal 8, content admins have the ability to not only add, edit, and change web pages (as well as swap out text quickly) but also to change fonts in numerous ways: sizing, font, colors, width, and more. Editors can also change the background, header colors, and images of a site with a few simple clicks, or change up with the background of text boxes look like. This enables sites like WordStream to change up product information quickly, play with text fonts or product wording to better reflect offerings, or even A/B test on the fly.

Engagement

By migrating to Drupal 8 and giving the WordStream site a new refreshed design, the WordStream website saw a major influx in their site traffic, including:
10.0% increase in new site users
12.0% increase in page views (3 months pre vs post launch)
12.7% increase in number of sessions
Overall traffic increases beating previous record highs by 5%