Old On-Prem Technology Stifles Team’s Productivity

Like many universities, Princeton used to run their sites on premises with their internal IT team focused on server maintenance and performance issues. Some things were easy to track and fine-tune and others not so much. 

Moraca said they used to have “a two-hour mystery slowdown period every night,” and no one could quite understand why. The time spent on fixing things like that was unjustifiable, and the university would have had to hire two extra WordPress system administrators just to keep the lights on. Instead, Princeton’s OIT decided to move their WordPress Multisite to Pantheon. 

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Walking the WebOps Talk

Switching to Pantheon helped boost website performance metrics right away. The latest Lighthouse score was at 86 and Largest Contentful Paint registered only a 2-second wait time before letting viewers see the page. 

With Pantheon automating routine tasks and providing enterprise-grade security, Princeton’s Web Development Services directed their attention to platform improvements, such as new plugins and modules. The 16-member crew can now focus more on supporting content teams and individual schools and building new sites to meet their needs, such as Princeton Public Health Review and Pop Goes the Page.

“We operate like a mini web design and development agency within Princeton,” said Moraca. “Without website operations, there would be more manual processes. And that would take away from us doing the university-focused work. We would be doing routine, time-consuming work. And so WebOps lets us make that process go quicker, smoother and more reliably.”

Pantheon’s Customer Support team has been instrumental in ensuring that reliability. Every quarter, they provide a technical review on site performance. “The expertise we’ve gotten has just been fabulous. The response time if we have a problem has been great. They open our eyes to things that we never even thought to look at and then they go further and say, well, you know, we noticed that X, Y and Z are loading slow and here's how you might remedy it,” shared Moraca. 

The WebOps impact on the student body and the faculty mirrors the original “tiger team” concept: a specialized cross-functional team brought together to address challenges from multiple perspectives to serve internal and external stakeholders.