Alongside many SaaS companies, Whereby found that they had a massive spike in new customers during COVID-19 - meaning that updates to their site needed to be made quickly. However, their approach relied on a blend of custom-coded pages and Contentful. Shipping these pages strained Whereby’s engineering resources and ad-hoc requests from the marketing team led to inconsistent layouts, designs, and messaging across the site. Engineers were frequently diverted from core product development to add new landing pages or make updates to the website. As a result, the site suffered from disjointedness, failing to deliver an engaging experience to customers.

Realising their situation, the marketing team at Whereby sought a site-building tool to empower them, minimise time-to-market for new landing pages, competitor content, and updates, and ultimately reestablish control over their online presence.

Taking back control with Framer

Whereby knew their new site builder needed to do three things: restore control to the marketing team, boast user-friendly intuitiveness, and enable rapid iterations to boost top-of-funnel signups.

After carefully assessing three website builders, Whereby swiftly realised that Framer was the perfect match for their needs, effortlessly blending in with their existing tech stack. Whereby was already using Fathom for analytics, Salesforce to manage sales leads, and Figma for design, so finding a tool that seamlessly integrated with their tech stack was crucial. The best part? Framer integrates well with these tools, making their new workflow feel like a breeze.

Working with a Framer Expert

Whereby have an in-house product design team who could have managed to build the site, but to get their new site up and running quickly, they reached out to the Framer Community to find a Framer Expert to manage their migration. They evaluated a few agencies and freelancers and decided to work with Matt Jumper, a Framer Expert based in Toronto.

Custom reverse proxy setup

As Whereby is a web-based product, they needed to ensure that their migration and new site ran smoothly alongside their user subdomains – meaning no downtime or effect on their customer usage. You can set up multiple web apps and static sites using reverse proxy and Framer using virtual hosts. Whereby’s team of engineers worked alongside Framer’s support team to successfully set up a reverse proxy.

“Having the Framer Support team available was amazing; they felt like an extension to our team – we could rely on them to provide feedback and advice when our engineers weren’t online due to timezone differences or when they didn’t know how to approach building something.”

Framer CMS

Framer’s robust CMS can be used for more than just blog posts. The team at Whereby has utilised Framer’s CMS to host various collections components that allow them to easily update tables and content without needing to touch the design. A great example is their pricing comparison page, built as a collection in the CMS. They can easily update different pricing page elements and content in Framer’s visual canvas, ensuring that the marketers at Whereby know precisely how their content will appear before pushing any changes live.

Highlights of switching to Framer

Whereby's transition from their custom code and Contentful solution to Framer, a process that involved finding an Expert and collaborating with our Support team for the reverse proxy setup, was completed in just two months. The outcome of this transition successfully addressed the three key objectives that the Whereby team had been aiming to achieve with their new tool.

This transformation allowed Whereby's engineers to shift their focus back to product development, freeing them from the distractions of site management (although they still occasionally integrate custom code components). Meanwhile, the marketing team gained the ability to intuitively create new campaign and competitor pages and implement any necessary content updates on the site. The seamless experience was facilitated by Framer's user-friendly design. The continuous support provided by the Framer team enabled Whereby's marketing, product design, and engineering teams to quickly become proficient in using Framer.

An additional benefit emerged for the Whereby team following their migration – a noticeable improvement in SEO rankings. Framer's robust SEO capabilities and optimisation features ensured that Whereby's SEO ranking remained stable during migration. This, coupled with the newfound control the marketing team had over site content, resulted in ongoing enhancements in SEO performance during the months following the launch of the new site.

“We had expected a dip in our SEO rankings when we migrated the site, but only saw our rankings increase in the days after we migrated to Framer.”

What’s next for Whereby?

Whereby are in an exciting stage of growth – after riding the tide of the pandemic's effect on their business, they are doubling down on their API integration and the strong security and privacy their tool offers to industries like telehealth, elearning, and digital mental health.

One focus for the next year includes increasing their GTM marketing campaigns. This includes shipping and iterating on new landing pages, building competitor campaigns to showcase the benefits of using Whereby over their competitors, and testing different messaging for their audiences. Framer’s ability to integrate with Salesforce (and other CRMs) means that the Whereby team can directly track enterprise leads that come through their site.

With Framer, Whereby has unlocked new levels of collaboration and speed within the marketing and design teams. They’ve got big plans for the next year, and Whereby’s website is more important than ever. We’re so excited to support them on their amazing journey.