Sometimes, you just have to dig in and do work.
A couple of weeks ago, I was on a call with an agency customer who needed to pause their work with us because their client had cut back on the content work they were doing together.
This is a fairly (all too, if I’m honest) common occurrence, but this time was a bit different.
Some of the feedback their team gave was that “the EditorNinja portal is slow.”
Dagger, meet my heart.
My heart sank. I knew they were right.
The reality is, I’ve known for a long time that our site was slow. I use it every day, and I’ve spent a lot of time (and gotten distracted away to other tasks. Squirrel!) waiting for certain pages to load for me, so I could do something for a customer.
I hadn’t heard the specific feedback from a customer before, and especially not as a (small) reason why they were pausing, so I hadn’t prioritized it.
But when I heard this feedback, I knew I needed to do something about it.
tl:DR – EditorNinja.com is now better looking and faster. This means you have a better experience when adding documents to your work queue.
The Numbers
Here are a few numbers for you tech geeks out there:
- Largest Contentful Paint went from 8.5s to 4.9s (still not amazing, but faster!)
- First Contentful Paint from 4.5s to 2.7s
- Overall performance – 29 on mobile to 57 (still not amazing, but better!)
Here’s our Pagespeed report:
Before I’m accused of it, I’m not bragging about our score. There is still work to be done to make it faster on mobile, especially since 2/3 of our traffic is from mobile devices, but it’s a lot better than it was.
Desktop is even better:
The New Things
There are a few new things on the site too:
- Updated navigation, to help you navigate to where you need to go faster.
- A new video talking about EditorNinja and what we do.
- A new WordPress theme (I’ll talk about that below in the Tech Stack area).
- Our new SEO Content Writing service.
The big one, of course, is the SEO blog writing service. We’ve spoken with a lot of companies who need editing, but also need consistent content produced.
I realized recently that we’re really good at operations. We’re good at hiring and at production, keeping to a tight editing schedule (we’ve returned 99.9987% of docs on time, across almost 6,000 documents). We can take that strength of ours and apply it to writing as well, which will further our goal of helping more businesses succeed with content marketing.
Production is just one part of the whole, and we’re not interested in doing promotion and other activities around content, but production is also an instrumental part of the whole. You can’t succeed with content without it, so we’re solving that first part.
The Tech Stack
EditorNinja is built on WordPress. Until recently, the site was on an older theme that I installed in 2021, never got the updates for, and was reliant on a lot of old and heavy plugins that were starting to break, had performance issues, and were becoming a real liability to having a stable service.
We’re hosted on Kinsta, which is still our preferred and recommended WordPress host. That didn’t change.
Here’s the current tech stack:
- WordPress
- Hosted on Kinsta
- Gravity Forms (for site forms and work requests)
- GravityView from GravityKit (to display Gravity Forms entries and handle the content workflow)
- Elementor (page builder)
- SavvyCal for scheduling links
The system works well for our current stage, handling hundreds of documents and hundreds of thousands of documents per month. At some point, just like with my last business, I’ll invest in rebuilding the system custom, though likely will move it to a custom web app built using Rails or a similar technology.
Need Editing Help?
We’re committed to building the best content editing and writing service online. Hopefully this post shows you that, and that we’re listening to our customers and making changes as it benefits them.
If you’re looking for a new solution to your content problems, let’s chat. I’d love to see if we can put our experience across thousands of documents and millions of words to work for you.
John
Founder & CEO
