How Cloudways Helped WP Bullet to Score 100% on Core Web Vitals for “I Speak Spoke Spoken”

About WP Bullet

WP Bullet is a WordPress and WooCommerce performance agency with a fully remote team in Europe. WP Bullet specializes in troubleshooting complex stability, crashing, and loading issues with their holistic approach to the server, infrastructure, hosting, code, and database. They’ve also helped clients achieve 100% good Google Core Web Vitals and 90+ Google PageSpeed Insights scores through in-depth, tailored frontend auditing and optimization protocols. Let’s read how Cloudways is helping WP Bullet when it comes to hosting for its clients.

Cloudways: What’s your agency name, and where is your agency’s headquarters situated?

Mike Andreasen: My agency is called WP Bullet, with headquarters in Cyprus. We chose this name for the precision of our approach to solving performance issues.

Cloudways: Could you please tell us about yourself. What is your designation at the agency? What are your core responsibilities?

Mike Andreasen: I’m the founder of WP Bullet. We are a close team of 5. My responsibilities are to help clients resolve their speed, stability, and performance issues. I help design the auditing methods, performance optimization techniques and tools, project management, and lead client communication.

Cloudways: What services does your agency provide, and how many clients do you currently have? Please tell us a bit about your agency here, like what do you guys do? Your team size, which market do you serve? Your USP, etc.

Mike Andreasen: We prefer quality over quantity. We are lucky to help anywhere between 5-10 clients per month. Over the years, we’ve found the greatest value we can provide our amazing clients is through our exploratory audits, performance troubleshooting, and longer engagements of optimizing sites through workshops and clusters of mini projects with optional ongoing monitoring.

We like to think our approach to performance is unique in the WordPress space, and we don’t use cookie-cutter approaches. Like a tailored suit, approaches specific to your site, business, and traffic generally fit best in our experience.

Cloudways: How did you first hear about Cloudways? Name one major problem that you were facing that made you switch to Cloudways. Something that was the tipping point and how Cloudways fixed that for you.

Mike Andreasen: We are picky with the hosts we trust for our clients. We need to know that the client has all of the tools and flexibility they require and that developers need to effectively troubleshoot, monitor, and analyze what is happening on the site.

The wide range of settings, tools, and services available in Cloudways and their dashboard empowers users, developers, and agencies to help themselves and their clients. We need access via SSH to run many of our auditing tools and find database issues that could be cursing sites to crash. We use New Relic to help identify bottlenecks from PHP functions, database calls, or external services. Cloudways makes all of this possible. It’s one of the few hosts that ticks our requirement boxes!

Cloudways: Before Cloudways, which hosting solution did you use? Are you using any other hosting service currently? If “Yes,” Why?

Mike Andreasen: We manage our own sites on Vultr for our non-WordPress services. This is simply because we need root access due to the nature of our work. Most managed WordPress hosts do not provide root access for good reasons.

Cloudways: What was your experience like with Cloudways when you first signed up? Please tell us about your first impressions.

Mike Andreasen: It was amazing to provision a Vultr or Google Cloud server in as little as 10 minutes without having to run any code or commands ourselves. That was a game-changer to know that we could do emergency migrations for clients from Codeable to help stabilize sites and find out where the bleeding was coming from as quickly as possible.

Cloudways: In your opinion, what sets us apart from other hosting providers? How has our built-in support for PHP-based apps such as WordPress, Laravel, and Magento made matters easier for you?

Mike Andreasen: The speed and simplicity with which we can deploy new sites and get existing stores transferred to great value and powerful hardware is what sets Cloudways apart. It’s hard to find the combination of price, performance, support, and features anywhere else.

Cloudways: How do you use Cloudways to solve your client’s problem(s)?

Mike Andreasen: For I Speak Spoke Spoken, they wanted to have green Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console. Thanks to Cloudways, we could identify some backend issues during our preliminary investigation that needed to be resolved in the database engine before we started optimizing the frontend.

Once we moved to the frontend audit and optimization, Cloudways features like SSH access and New Relic helped us to be extremely thorough without unnecessary friction or headaches. Their staging site feature enabled us to run experiments so I Speak Spoken could see what kind of performance benefits they would see after the optimization process.

Cloudways: How has Cloudways contributed to the success of your agency? Tell us about how Cloudways’ features align with your needs.

Mike Andreasen: Working with clients worldwide, we must spin up a hosting solution that will accommodate any country since our clients from Codeable may have an audience in any geographic location. Cloudways lets us choose between many server providers so that we can provide hosting closest to the visitors that matter most to our clients.

We have had clients with serious performance issues that had 80% of their problems disappear after moving to Cloudways. How can you get more aligned than that? If there are remaining speed or stability challenges once the client has moved to Cloudways, we know the tools and services are available to find out why.

Cloudways: Out of five cloud providers available on Cloudways which one(s) do you prefer to use and why?

Mike Andreasen: Vultr is our preferred cloud provider. They stay on top of hardware issues and infrastructure developments. If we need a server that can be resized up and down, we like Google Cloud. This can be especially useful for a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale with unusually high amounts of traffic.

Cloudways: If you could briefly describe the values you perceive from Cloudways?

Mike Andreasen: Cloudways commits to making tools and information available to people who choose to host with them. They are always innovating new improvements and are open to suggestions. Similarly, we approach optimization, which fits with our philosophy.

Cloudways: How do you feel about being a part of the Cloudways Agency Partnership Program? What additional value does the program provide to you? Do you think this program is going to help your agency grow in the long run?

Mike Andreasen: Having an account manager, higher level support, and training helps us help our clients more effectively. The Agency Partnership makes this possible and frees up our time so we can focus on what matters: our clients and solving their problems!

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Cloudways: Do you think that by switching to Cloudways, you were able to free up resources at your end? If yes, how were you able to utilize those?

Mike Andreasen: Definitely, not having to spend time managing sites through SSH and the command line is a huge time-saver! The Cloudways dashboard does everything for us and anything special we need to do, the Cloudways support staff handle. It’s amazing!