Massachusetts’ Wheaton College Launches Digital Transformation and Fine-Tunes Marketing Engine

Challenge: 10-Year-Old Website on Life Support

Wheaton’s Marketing and Communications Division grows the institution’s reach and reputation through digital-first marketing campaigns that drive to the college’s online footprint. The main public-facing website is the division’s primary marketing tool, and its lean web and digital team is in charge of the site’s software, infrastructure, and hosting platform. 

The 10-year-old legacy website was no longer the asset the team needed. Its original creators modeled it as more of an internal communications and content archiving tool than a user-facing marketing platform. 

The website was unstable and experienced frequent outages. When one outage lasted an incredible 15 hours, the team immediately switched hosts to Rackspace for stability. Working together with Pantheon Premier partner, Boston Digital, they took advantage of the more stable environment to rebrand and redesign the website in WordPress — as a strategic decision to better support digital marketing innovation long-term. 

Once they completed the foundation of a marketing-centric site, they moved on to the second phase: adopting an advanced WebOps backbone to support continual development, accelerate performance and workflow, and improve developer productivity with highly automated processes so they can focus on innovation instead of maintenance.

Why Pantheon: Supporting Small Colleges That Do Big Work 

Pantheon enabled the one-person development team to nearly double its productivity. Rapid development allows the college to optimize its major branding website with excellent visitor experiences, and fast performance along with stability protect those important experiences.  

Pantheon stability was also vital to the college. Gene Begin, VP Marketing and Communications at Wheaton, said, “Pantheon gives us a stable platform to advance brand adoption of the college, which is part of our primary mission as a division. Driving enrollment is our focus, and the website is a critical part of that. It needs to be fast, and it needs to be 100% available to prospective students.” 

Pantheon’s advanced WebOps platform and toolset let the team quickly respond to marketing requests while freeing up time for high-value projects without increasing headcount. 

McGlynn said, “Pantheon is just way ahead of everybody. Its founders are developers, and they understand how to create a developer-first WebOps platform without being exclusionary.”

Results: Fast, Stable, and Development-Centric

Pantheon’s advanced automation and workflows immediately saved time, accelerated processes, and lowered the risk of  manual updates. McGlynn said, “The development workflow was way ahead of its time and it’s still evolving. One example is Pantheon’s ability to transparently push updates. I was at a major university’s technical presentation on updating code, and their solution was clever but quite technical and complicated. I thought, ‘You would have saved yourselves a lot of time if you had just moved to Pantheon.’”

“Our web redesign, or reimagination as we like to call it, truly was a digital transformation for the college,” said Begin. “We were changing workflows, replacing typical behaviors, and prioritizing the external user over the internal user to make it an effective marketing tool. These massive changes sent a shock wave through the community, but the results proved the approach effective.”

Increased page load speed benefited users and improved search results since Google page ranking algorithms reward high-speed page loads. Pantheon consistently delivers that speed: even during the college’s highest-ever traffic month, a record two million hits did not affect its performance. Pantheon also delivered an exceptionally stable platform that provided the college with the high uptime it needs to serve its prospective students.

Performance is also critical for personalization. WordPress enables marketers to gather user information, including biographical, location-based, and site behavior data. However, the personalization process is compute-intensive, which can slow down page loads. Pantheon’s performance prevents slowdowns, allowing the team to offer a personalized user experience without sacrificing speed.