Empowering Cloud – Prerender Case Study
Empowering Cloud addresses the problem of hosting heavy JavaScript content with Prerender. As a result, their traffic skyrocketed.
Transforming the customer’s journey through personalized training.
Keeping up with the latest updates on Microsoft Teams can be overwhelming. The product development is rapid, pushing IT professionals to the edge in maintaining a working ecosystem for their organizations. But Empowering Cloud saw the opportunity to offer a breakthrough solution.
In short, they craft videos explaining the Microsoft Teams feature updates and how they impact team workflows. Not only that, they also offer custom training content that is frequently shared on social platforms, and a community forum for members to interact and exchange knowledge.
After nailing the concept, they reached an impressive milestone on their first anniversary (2023). They celebrated with more than 18,000 video plays and 132,000+ total minutes watched, all thanks to the 3,000+ people who joined their classes. This achievement has made them a promising player in their niche. That said, offering interactive and diverse JS-based content may be valuable for Empowering Cloud’s clients, but from a technical perspective, this is very problematic. Common JS-based website threats, namely slow PageSpeed, poor SEO performance, and broken social sharing, are some roadblocks that Empowering Cloud had to confront.
To get around this challenge, they found Prerender.
As you can imagine, the heavier the content, the slower the PageSpeed.
Tom Arbuthnot, the co-founder of Empowering Cloud, realized they were facing a slow page load time issue due to the nature of the company’s main content: training videos.
Hosting hundreds of videos takes a lot of website resources, which can jeopardize their PageSpeed scores, and in turn, their Google search results performance.
“We were building our platform out, and the first thing we noticed [was slow loading time]. We knew we’d have to optimize for PageSpeed and SEO for Google search. We know that PageSpeed is a really important factor, especially for mobile users,” shared Arbuthnot.
Furthermore, to reach out to more prospects, they started sharing content on social media. But JavaScript blocks the Open Graph tags attributed to their tutorial videos shared on LinkedIn and Twitter. This results in a blank description of the video preview and zero engagement.
Empowering Cloud knew they had to solve these problems quickly to accelerate their growth.
Before discovering Prerender, Empowering Cloud was considering adopting server-side rendering (SSR), but soon realized this pricey solution wasn’t an option. It costs around $120,000 to reach initial operation capacity with no performance guarantee. Gambling on this is just too risky. “We considered building SSR, and that would be an overhead on us and the development overhead.”
A cost-effective plug-and-play prerendering solution.
Empowering Cloud found Prerender to be an SSR alternative that performs better at a significantly lower price. They started with a free test, but ended up with a subscription that helps them execute around 20,000 renders monthly. Empowering Cloud instantly knew they’d hit the jackpot.
When the team came across Prerender, “we signed up for a test account and got a certain level of free renders. It was literally hours with our development team [to test Prerender], and they were like, oh, problems solved—like it works now on Twitter, it works on LinkedIn.”
Thanks to the 3-simple installation steps, Empowering Cloud was able to get everything up and running within a day. “I think literally within a day, and, oh, look, it works. And that was it. It was very easy. We didn’t even have to reach out to the [Prerender] team.”
Next, Empowering Cloud trusted Prerender to improve more of their technical SEO elements, particularly in scaling their server response times to help boost their SEO rankings.
“As we dug in, we started looking at all the technical SEO optimization solutions you were doing around search, page load speed, and more.”
And as expected, they saw their traffic soar.
Faster PageSpeed and rendered social tags for better online visibility.
After implementing Prerender, Empowering Cloud saw a significant difference in their website’s performance. Not only did the PageSpeed increase, but also the traffic.
“We definitely saw an uptick in search, an improvement on our PageSpeed and server response time.” Now, they can enjoy server response times under 50 milliseconds!
Prerender renders their JS web elements in advance, allowing URLs to be fetched and loaded quicker whenever a request is made. And since search engines love pages that respond fast, having a website with speedy response time helps Empowering Cloud to attain high SEO scores. This helps them climb to the top SERPs and boost incoming traffic.
The same situation is also applied to social sharing.
Prerender has created the rendered version of their social Open Graph tags, so social media bots now have unrestricted access to display the rich content assets (video description, blog snippets, URLs, etc.) whenever a URL is shared on social media platforms. This issue no longer prevents Empowering Cloud from hooking more clients through social sharing.
Next, our simple reporting feature has also helped Empowering Cloud understand and control their website performance easier, even for people without a tech background. They can monitor PageSpeed, see which pages need extra attention, how many pages are being prerendered, and more.“I’d say the reporting is really strong, like being able to see the search engines hitting your cache and how our PageSpeed is loading to your service. Again, I’m not a technical dev, but I can make sense of all the reporting, which is really nice. I definitely encourage people, if they’ve got this challenge to at least have a look.”
Interested to see how we can help your brand achieve the same? Try Prerender!
Try Prerender for free for the first 1,000 URLs and experience all the benefits our partners are already enjoying. Installing Prerender is simple, and its value is almost instant!
