Within the dynamic world of digital advertising, staying forward of the technological curve is crucial.

That is a part of what drives Artwork & Science, a full-service digital company and the winner of WP Engine’s inaugural Company Companion Awards for “Headless Undertaking of the Yr.”

To be taught extra concerning the modern work Artwork & Science does and the small print behind the company’s award-winning venture, we spoke with Artwork & Science Technical Director Peter Toi to take a look at what’s behind his company’s success. 

Thanks, Peter, and congratulations in your Company Companion Award. Earlier than we get into these particulars, please inform us extra concerning the origins of Artwork & Science and its core competencies.

Artwork & Science began again in 2011 as The Juice Company, a digital advertising agency sitting on the intersection of technique, consumer expertise, and know-how innovation. We rebranded as Artwork & Science following the acquisition of a number one Toronto-based search engine marketing/PPC agency in 2013. Artwork & Science brings collectively the artistic inspiration of the artist with the analytical rigour of the scientist. 

Over the past 13 years, we’ve grown right into a full-service digital company. We’re proud to be Clutch’s #1 digital company in Canada, a 2023 Google Premier Companion, and ranked as one in every of Canada’s High 500 Rising Corporations 4 years in a row.

Our core competencies embrace model technique, artistic promoting, web site improvement, eCommerce technique, search engine marketing, and CRO efficiency, media plans, buys and reporting, and modern, experimental tasks.

How has your partnership with WP Engine affected the company’s development and success?

Artwork & Science has been a member of the Company Companion Program since 2018, however our relationship with WP Engine simply goes again quite a lot of years to once we first began utilizing WP Engine as our main WordPress internet hosting platform. Humorous sufficient, I nonetheless recall the primary time I used to be launched to WP Engine as each sponsor and speaker at a Toronto WordCamp a few years in the past. From that first interplay, I thought of WP Engine to be the gold customary of managed WordPress internet hosting they usually’ve lived as much as my first impressions ever since.

Internet hosting with WP Engine offers us peace of thoughts and permits us to concentrate on areas the place we carry worth, corresponding to offering purchasers with strategic insights, artistic pondering, and constructing award-winning websites. As a artistic company, we don’t essentially need to be spending our time engaged on infrastructure and managing internet hosting.

On the identical time, a lot of our options are extremely technical and require help for Git workflows and pipelines, high-performance CDNs and caching, and enterprise-level safety. WP Engine has offered us with right-sized options for all of our WordPress tasks.

It’s been nice seeing  WP Engine’s options develop with us and proceed to help companies like us. Add-ons like Sensible Plugin Supervisor enable us to focus our vitality on creating worth for our purchasers fairly than sustaining the established order.

The help we get as an company by our membership within the Company Companion Program has completely contributed to our development and success. The help we obtain from WP Engine, each for technical and gross sales help, is persistently top-notch.

The account administration and gross sales help groups have been instrumental companions on pitches, serving to to craft internet hosting options the place safety, visitors, or enterprise necessities are scrutinized. Direct entry to tier 1 help has additionally been invaluable, whether or not we require efficiency profiling or different troubleshooting. 

And I can say, with out hesitation, that the help from our account supervisor and entry to key members of the Atlas workforce was essential to having the ability to construct and launch the Embark web site below tight time constraints.

May you share insights into the Embark venture, which was a headless WordPress venture, and the decision-making behind it?

The Embark venture is an ideal instance of our full-service capabilities. Our consumer wished to  rebrand, specializing in a brand new messaging platform to distinguish itself within the RESP monetary providers sector. This required complete help, together with branding, campaigns, and web site improvement. 

With that in thoughts, the choice to go headless was apparent. As a contemporary monetary providers firm, our consumer’s digital footprint included an internet site, consumer portal, and the potential for a cell app sooner or later. Headless structure permits for the syndication of content material from a single CMS to a wide range of platforms. That flexibility in content material distribution and supply was actually one of many important causes we selected headless and WP Engine Atlas for this venture. 

Moreover, our consumer had already talked about headless early on within the discovery course of as an strategy they wished us to contemplate, so it was a reasonably straightforward dialog.

The choice to make use of WordPress was made as a result of it was a platform the advertising workforce was conversant in. WordPress is, after all, ubiquitous throughout the Web and amongst advertising groups and corporations world wide. So familiarity, ease of content material enhancing, and the evolution of API integrations, each RESTful and GraphQL, have been good causes to decide on  WordPress. 

 Headless was additionally engaging for this venture due to the elevated safety we achieved because of an API-only content material resolution. 

WordPress—when deployed appropriately on a platform like WP Engine and dealt with by a improvement workforce who is aware of what they’re doing—is a really safe platform. Realizing that we’d have the ability to limit entry to the backend, because of delivering all content material by an API, allowed us to implement extra safety measures, reduce the plugins, and impose stricter guidelines for improvement. 

What have been a few of the technical challenges and triumphs within the Embark venture?

One of many important challenges was making certain excessive efficiency, which was difficult given our four-month timeline. 4 months is tight to construct a website of this dimension and complexity, and even tighter if you embrace efficiency optimizations, content material entry, and implementation of search engine marketing and monitoring. And all of this was achieved on a comparatively new platform and new know-how. 

What stood out right here was the help we received from WP Engine. I can’t thank our account supervisor sufficient for the companion help that was offered to us and the WP Engine technical workforce we labored with. They have been instrumental in serving to us hold to our timeline and keep away from weeks of trial-and-error to develop greatest practices and optimizations. We had direct contact with help who have been extremely responsive—our success is actually owed partially to the excessive degree of help we obtained.

This was very true with reference to attaining spectacular API efficiency with < 100 millisecond response occasions. It was additionally the case as we leveraged WP Engine’s caching mechanism and WPGraphQL Sensible Cache. As soon as we had that whole caching pipeline activated and refactored our construct course of and code in a method that every part was appropriate, we noticed an enchancment of 6,000 occasions higher efficiency between our first builds and our final. The positioning is blazing quick because of all of that work.

Are you able to inform us extra about profitable Headless Undertaking of the Yr? What’s the affect of this recognition? 

Successful this award is a testomony to our workforce’s arduous work and dedication. It acknowledges our efforts in staying updated with the newest in internet improvement, lowering technical debt for our purchasers, and setting them up for long-term success. It’s additionally a recognition of our dedication to retaining our expertise present and making certain our purchasers obtain trendy options that assist them future-proof their digital presence.

However the web site is only one a part of this huge enterprise. Actually, the whole workforce at Artwork & Science must be acknowledged for the arduous work they put in to make sure this venture was successful.

Everybody at Artwork & Science–beginning with the strategic and inventive groups who developed a ravishing model with a journey metaphor, to the technical groups who introduced it to life, and the consumer providers workforce who managed the venture all through–collaborated to make this venture successful. I additionally need to thank Embark Pupil Corp. for inviting us to companion to form the way forward for college students on their post-secondary journey. Nice visions assist make nice work attainable.

Because the technical director, I’m over the moon that we received an award for headless venture of the 12 months!  We’re all the time adapting to modifications within the know-how ecosystem and setting. It is a large validation of our efforts to adapt and innovate in our business.

Thanks, Peter, and congratulations to Artwork & Science on this well-deserved award! 

Discover out extra about WP Engine’s Company Companion Program—the most important WordPress company ecosystem—right here, or go to WP Engine to be taught extra about our totally managed WordPress platform.