Nancy Critchley Photography
+ MEET NANCY CRITCHLEY PHOTOGRAPHY
Based in the western region of Canada, Nancy Critchley Photography specializes in wedding and family photography, and produces editorial and advertising photography as well. With a wide-ranging portfolio and a business that’s been in operation for over 10 years, nancycritchleyphoto.com includes over 200 high-resolution photos. There’s a strong need for solid performance from her hosting.
+ EARLY WORDPRESS STRUGGLES
Since the beginning, Nancy Critchley Photography has run on WordPress. However, the business faced a lot of limitations and concerns with the WordPress service managed by its previous host. The greatest concern was image load time. High-resolution images need server power in order to load fast. The underpowered service she was on simply couldn’t deal with the needs of her site, and it was taking anywhere between 15 and 20 seconds for each image to load. According to Nancy, security and site stability were also frequent issues. She recalls several instances where she thought her website was being attacked by malicious activity, or found her site was no longer online due to hosting issues. The lack of good communication from the hosting provider regarding maintenance updates and security left her always wondering if her site would be up when a prospective client tried to view it.
“My photos were not loading. When you went to my site, it took forever for images to load. Everything dragged. I felt there was no reliability in my site or web hosting at all, and it made me very nervous. I felt my website was vulnerable to attacks.”
–Nancy Critchley
+ THE SWITCH TO MEDIA TEMPLE
Immediately after moving her site to Media Temple’s Managed WordPress service, significant changes were seen in both site performance and stability. According to Nancy, image load time decreased dramatically to within 1-2 seconds. Given her dependence on slow satellite internet in her Canadian countryside community, every second of site performance improvement makes a massive difference when clients are viewing her work. Moreover, she hasn’t experienced the outages and problems she once did. Media Temple’s thorough communication around maintenance and security updates gives Nancy confidence that her site will be available when her business needs it.
“You are under-promising and over-delivering, in my estimation. That’s the way I like to operate.”
–Nancy Critchley
