Why KeepTruckin Chose WordPress: Our Company’s Web Case Study

KeepTruckin is bringing trucks online with its state-of-the-art software and hardware solutions, serving over 66,000 fleets and 325,000 vehicles. KeepTruckin has fundamentally re-shaped the landscape of how freight moves on our roads and digitalized the old-fashioned industry that serves as the backbone of the global economy.

In this article, we will discover how KeepTruckin managed to reach out to its ever-growing audience through WordPress, which turned out to be a perfect fit for KT’s development needs. WordPress has helped us convert potential prospects to happy customers by utilizing targeted marketing campaigns and quick market launches.

Getting Started

KeepTruckin kindled its innovation in its web products line by opting for Ruby on Rails, the de-facto startup technology of the time. RoR continues to be highly effective for our main application in order to develop a scalable and reliable system that tends to our business needs. However, for the pace required to deliver customized marketing content and to launch customer acquisition campaigns at lightning speeds, we needed to reduce friction with our main application and create a standalone platform for the marketing team to carry out their daily activities without interrupting KeepTruckin’s core services.

KeepTruckin’s transition into a large enterprise

As we transitioned into a large enterprise, our needs, market size, and stakeholders grew. We needed to accelerate our marketing and customer acquisition campaigns, diversify our audience, target specific customer segments, and deliver personalized experiences to our ever-growing customer base. However, the old tech stack couldn’t keep up with the agility asked of our marketing ambitions and our organization’s marketing growth needs.

The following are some major limitations that our developers faced while sharing the same codebase with our product team, and lacked the independence to improve processes to suit their needs.

Single Code Base

Marketing content updates had to face lengthy product process overheads, entangled cycles, and unrelated test cases before reaching the audience. As a result, our time to market was much higher than it had to be.

Team Dependencies

Our design and marketing teams were always dependent upon a developer to help them make even the simplest content updates and finalize any campaigns before launch. Hence, in order to create a fast-paced release environment, and remove potential bottlenecks, we wanted to empower them to interact with our marketing website, with controlled access.

Content Revision History

As expected with a static codebase, all changes went live whenever code was deployed to production. As a result, there was no easy option to undo content changes in case of any mistakes before the next release cycle — a version rollback, of course.

Language Barriers

Web Developers are usually more familiar with traditional languages like JavaScript/HTML. And adapting to CoffeeScript/HAML is often met with some degree of hesitation. This adds to the learning curve and delays in codebase contributions from new hires, increasing onboarding times.

Backlogs

Urgencies built around seemingly trivial tasks from marketing took up a lot of unnecessary time, making it harder for developers to get through the backlog and prioritize major tasks such as; developing UI layouts, updating site functionalities, and maintaining codebase.

With these growing pain points, we had to look for a new tech stack to serve our audience with a better user experience and meet the rapidly changing needs of the business and the market. The new tech stack not only had to solve for existing limitations but also offer built-in security, capacity for scalability and customizability.

As an enterprise, we needed a broader, more dynamic platform — a chassis for managing our marketing website content and campaigns with agility. We started leaning towards a CMS that would help us display, manage, edit our content, publish new pages, create forms, and launch campaigns with a low time to market. With these goals in mind, we began our search. After rigorous research and discussions with stakeholders, comparing multiple options, we found WordPress to be the perfect fit for us. Let’s take a look at the comparison table below to get a brief idea about some of the CMS we considered and the feature set that helped us make our decision.

WordPress and its competitors in review

The Chosen one — WordPress

There’s no doubt about the popularity of WordPress as at the time of writing — it powers 35% of the websites on the internet. The nature of WordPress being an open-source CMS brings value and builds our confidence. Its vibrant community has a strong commitment to maintaining and upgrading WordPress. This enables us to add customizations to an advanced level, bending it to fit our needs and business requirements.

Along with its customization capabilities, WordPress also provides ease of use, feature-rich content creation, user management, workflows, and approval process for content management, security, and personalized user experiences.

Rapid content changes & user access management:

WordPress’s user-friendly dashboard and backend editor allows anyone to make content changes on the website — even without any technical knowledge. However, it is important to note that “with great power comes great responsibility.” This is especially true in the case of managing content changes on the website. Fortunately enough, WordPress provides role-based access with granular control that allows specific users to make content changes and controlled access of the site:

• Our design and marketing teams can easily make content changes in existing pages but can only publish new pages upon the dev team’s approval.
• With the help of the page preview option, editors can view the initial page draft before publishing. It is great to get an actual feel of the content, fix any errors, or broken user experiences, before publishing the page.
• Revision history automatically saves page versions every 60 seconds while a user is working on them. This is useful in preventing accidental loss of data and in improving the editorial workflow, allowing you to compare your post/page versions and restoring them to an older version if needed.
• Our editors enjoy the independence to manage the blog. This helps them quickly publish blog posts, news, new product launches, feature information, and tips and guidance for our customers.

Plugins

The ability to tap into a library of hundreds of plugins is an exceptional core strength of WordPress. For enterprises, however, it is important to evaluate when custom in-house solutions should be preferred over third-party plugins. At KeepTruckin, we’ve been using plugins for:

• Lazy loading our images, serving static files from CDNs and delivering seamlessly embedded content and videos at high speed.
• Ease of migration for content updates between production and development environments. Saving time without making duplicate effort.
• SEO content optimizations, that helped us drastically increase our organic reach and engagement.

SEO

WordPress has a lot to offer in SEO, as it was initially developed and marketed as a blogging platform. This strength serves as a cornerstone for reaching larger audiences, allowing us to easily target content to specific customer segments and adapting to their needs at a fast pace.

• Snippet preview option helps to ensure that meta tags like titles and descriptions aren’t being cut off in user search results. This helps us keep our meta tags according to SEO best practices.
• We can un-index de-commissioned pages with just a click and add redirections for them in WordPress within seconds to avoid hurting our SEO ranking.
• We can automatically generate XML sitemaps in WordPress upon adding new pages, keeping search engines updated with changes taking place on our site, and as a result, improve our SEO rankings.
• Page Analysis provides specific feedback on how search engine-friendly a page is or isn’t, providing us with insights to improve and optimize our content.

Performance

Contrary to popular belief, WordPress offers remarkable performance while loading pages with heavy content. We introduced a CMS, a host of extra features in our workflow, a bunch of plugins to make our lives easier, and yet we were able to improve our page load time by about 26% upon migrating to WordPress — from 6.77s to 5.01.

Languages & Learning Curve

As of WordPress 5.x the main development language shifted from PHP to JavaScript and its library. Transitioning from CoffeeScript and building on the same JavaScript concepts, our developers, found migration to WordPress fairly simple. And building on this high level of code familiarity resulted in reduced time in development from days to hours. Making it easier for us to develop WordPress custom themes and plugins at a faster pace.

• With a small team of three developers, we were successfully able to migrate to our new WordPress website within three months, two months before the delivery date.
• WordPress allowed us the kind of throughput we hadn’t seen before. As a result, our team started taking on more and more projects, driving higher revenue impact. To build on that momentum, we were able to grow our team significantly, taking it from three engineers to eight in just one year.

Summing up…

By utilizing the flexible and customizable WordPress options such as hooks, filters, custom post types and custom blocks, our developers at KeepTruckin have created an advanced framework in order to optimize marketing processes and workflows within KeepTruckin. This provides agility within our non-technical teams, like marketing, to interact with our platform and set up campaigns. Consequently empowering their workflows by reducing their dependency on developers resulting in reduced time to market.

Similarly, creating custom blocks is extremely complicated. The entire process is both time and code-intensive. The real challenge, however, is presenting the custom block in the best possible way to create a seamless editing experience when dealing with that block in the WordPress editor, especially for blocks with complex functionalities. The real feat for our developers is usually when the end product, a custom block, is so powerful that it can cater to a plethora of minor tweaks such as changes in assets, fonts, and colors, without requiring a developer to go back to the codebase.

The strength of WordPress lies in its simplicity, accessibility, and versatility. It empowers us to carry out large scale marketing operations at high velocity, helps grow our customer base, and streamlines our marketing and software development workflows. We utilized and built upon the robust, interoperable, and flexible nature of WordPress. Our marketing and development teams are confident in the agility and strengths provided by WordPress that empower us to achieve our ambitions to our full potential.

I would like to thank my teammates, Hamna Asher and Rafah Mehfooz for their input on this article. This would not have been possible without them. It is a pleasure working with such creative and hard-working colleagues.

We’re excited to be a part of the Medium community! We plan to post many new stories, so be sure to follow our publication. Want to join the growing team at KeepTruckin? We’re hiring!