If you run an online business, you are probably aware of the many issues that can arise while managing a website. You also know that, in order to keep performance high, it is important to periodically maintain your website. Maintenance requires time and constant attention. It consumes energy and concentration. Often, at the cost of the peace of mind that is essential to living and working well.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus said it best – “The serene person brings serenity to themselves and to others”. And that’s exactly how it is: when we are at peace with ourselves, our minds become clearer, we are able to stop worrying and the quality of our work improves.
In order to maintain such a valuable balance, it’s important to be able to delegate. A WordPress website needs constant assistance to fix bugs that come up as it grows and optimize elements to improve performance. Delegating all this to professionals helps you focus on the part of the work that only you can do. As a result, you can balance technical management and productivity, achieving better results and preserving your peace of mind.
The importance of ongoning support: Expatclic and WP-OK
Today we’ll take a look at the work done with the non-profit organization Expatclic, an international and multicultural web portal that assists expatriate women at every stage of their relocation. The association publishes articles, interviews, and practical information for expatriation. It is also a place where women around the world can meet and share their experiences
Expatclic was born in 2004 from the experience of Claudia Landini, an Italian woman who left her country 30 years ago and, since then, has lived in every corner of the planet: eight years in Africa between Sudan, Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Congo Brazzaville, ten in Latin America between Honduras and Peru, four and a half in Jerusalem and four in Jakarta. Claudia decided to put her cosmopolitan experience to good use. She created a non-profit association that would be a point of contact and support for all expatriate women.
Expatclic’s issues: uncertainty, vulnerability, and fragmented management
In fifteen years of online presence, Expatclic.com has undergone many changes: from an initial structure developed in HTML to an intermediate phase on the SPIP CMS, and then its current form powered by WordPress.
Over the course of its evolution, small problems affecting the site’s performance accumulated. They were making it difficult for Claudia to run her organization effectively. An example: a few years ago, after the activation of a new multilingual homepage, daily visits dropped from 4,000 to 400.
Claudia herself described the site as “a chaotic platform where problems dragged on from the first versions”. A real labyrinth of subdomains and mysterious files difficult to manage and navigate.
Over the years, the Expatclic team has turned to different webmasters for non-continuous, external support. Due to technicians with limited time available not knowing the site well enough, the resolution of problems was often slow. The result was a succession of jobs half done with a consequent decline in visits. Users, faced with the slowdown of the site, gave up browsing entirely.
As it often happens, the technical problems also had psychological implications. “The consequences weighed on my team’s morale. This situation of vulnerability and uncertainty ate up a lot of our energy,” Claudia told us. Recovering the lost serenity was necessary. Not only for a matter of personal well-being but also for the efficiency of the association itself.
Our interventions: site reorganization and constant monitoring
When Claudia contacted us to study a support program together she was looking, more than anything else, for someone to relieve her of the constant worries the site brought.
Once she subscribed to our support plan, as a first step we activated regular backups. We eliminated the risk of losing projects and files. We then moved on to a general reorganization of the site’s structure. This was meant to fix all the little problems that had accumulated over the years.
We set goals together with the Expatclic team:
- allow the viewing and sharing of all content, articles and interviews on the site;
- build a constant social presence to facilitate interaction with the community;
- set up a continuous technical collaboration to make the site more easily reachable and increase the number of expatriate women around the world using the service.
Our team was immediately available to Expatclic to intervene promptly in case of difficulties. With our support we eliminated the uncertainty related to timing and availability that had conditioned previous collaborations.
What about results? A +30% increase in traffic and no more worries
On a technical level, our interventions have resulted in a 30% increase in website visits within a short time. However, we are just as proud of the less visible results of our work, as highlighted by Claudia’s own words:
“The benefits are mostly psychological for us. Now we feel calmer and we know that we can think of new projects. We know there is someone who will help us convert them into user-friendly web services”.
WP-OK has given me the peace of mind I needed to use the site in a more confident, creative and imaginative way. I know that whatever idea we want to implement, the WP-OK team is there to assist us.
What also struck me is how all the WP-OK technicians know how to be friendly and empathetic while maintaining a high level of professionalism.”
Above all, the Expatclic team needed to feel assured that everything was running smoothly. Knowing that you can delegate an important part of your work such as technical management relieves you of a number of concerns that can turn into real nightmares. The purpose of our constant presence goes far beyond improving statistical results: we aim to raise the overall quality of our clients’ work to the highest level.
Claudia understood the importance of relying on experts on an ongoing basis for the administration of her non-profit association’s website. Previous experiences taught her that occasional collaborations can create even more issues than those they are meant to solve.
Thank you Claudia!
The WP-OK team would like to thank Claudia for agreeing to share her experience and for the nice words about the assistance she received.
From our side, we are very happy that the work we did together helped Claudia find the peace of mind that allowed her to focus on the most important aspects of her project. We are convinced that Expatclic will be able to support more and more expatriate women, also thanks to a website that is now functioning in an optimal way.
