“The project management software market is fiercely competitive. We know that to remain on top of our game, we’d have to perfect the foundation of our business: Our website. Elementor has proven instrumental on our journey towards an eye-catching, high-performing, and, most importantly, converting site.”
This is the story of Hive, the world’s first democratic project management platform. Hive provides powerful features like automated task management, custom workflows, messaging, note-taking, and collaboration in one single dashboard. This makes it one of the leading tools on the market for helping teams move faster, no matter where they are working.
Using a public roadmap, known as the Hive Forum, Hive invites customers to share feedback, request new features, and vote for the things they would like to see on the platform. New features are released weekly based on this customer feedback. In 2021 alone, Hive delivered 350 new features for more than 700 individual companies.
Hive is used by thousands of fast-moving teams, both big and small, and spanning across industries. Hive users include teams from Comcast, Toyota, Electronic Arts, and Starbucks. Hive users benefit from the flexible pricing plans which let each organization add on specific apps as they need them, and Hive Solo also allows teams of 1 or 2 to utilize the full power of Hive totally free, forever.
Like any other prominent SaaS plarform, Hive’s public face and its primary online presence is its website. Enjoying significant growth within a short period drove Hive to elevate its site. The desired result would better facilitate its more sophisticated workflows and heightened expectations.
The road to its site’s current version has been a unique one, with Elementor playing a pivotal role throughout. Here’s how Hive ended up with an awesome, converting website, built with Elementor
The Challenge
Operating in a fiercely competitive business niche, Hive’s decision makers were resolute in their desire to create a truly exceptional website. When prospects would land on it, Hive’s website needed to immediately capture their attention. Its unique design would have to be matched by its best-in-class speed and responsiveness.
“Right from the get-go, it was clear that the finished product would be WordPress-based.”
Used by a lion’s share of the world’s sites, WordPress is the most popular CMS, and with good reason. An abundance of plugins and a vibrant user community are elements unique to WordPress, and good enough reasons to sway any contemplating web creator to choose it over competing platforms. However, WordPress’ distinguishing characteristic, and the one that ultimately led Hive to immediately gravitate towards it, is the fact that it is an open-source platform.
The latter provides web creators with unlimited flexibility. WordPress can be leveraged to create websites that follow any and all design schemes, no matter how complex and intricate.
The task of building, and subsequently maintaining Hive’s WordPress website, was entrusted to an in-house developer.
Despite a successful launch, issues soon began to arise.
With only one staff member capable of handling the technical challenges that come with operating a WordPress website, Hive’s marketing department found itself hitting a roadblock. Every change, as small and seemingly insignificant, required the intervention of that said developer. Such heavy dependence on a single developer inevitably led to requests piling up, and a severe lag in assignments being successfully completed.
“Something had to change. We needed to pay our old developer to make even the smallest changes and it was causing a delay in our updates. More importantly, we wanted the flexibility to be to add and copy pages ourselves, ad-hoc.”
All of this coincided with Hive enjoying a period of significant growth, resulting in it expanding its marketing initiatives considerably. Augmenting its offerings and features, Hive’s marketing department would need to create a ton of new landing pages, blog posts, and other website-based content.
The current workflow process wouldn’t support such an increase in landing page creation and deployment.
“Something had to change”, says Michaela Rollings, Head of Brand and Content at Hive. “We needed to pay our old developer to make even the smallest changes, and it was causing a delay in our updates. More importantly, we wanted the flexibility to be able to add and copy pages ourselves, ad-hoc.”
Testing the Contenders
One thing had become clear: the current website building solution would not suffice; the need for a platform that would facilitate Hive’s growth ambitions had become pressing.
Before any platforms were considered, Hive’s decision markers were resolute in their website remaining WordPress-based.
The benefits of the open-source platform were abundant. A vibrant, uber-active community would mean that Hive’s developers could find an answer to virtually any complication they’d encounter. The wealth of plugins available within the WordPress ecosystem would ensure that Hive’s site could be perfected even after takeoff.
Most importantly, with the website already based on WordPress, it would prove extremely time-consuming to migrate it to another content management system.
With that determined, Hive’s decision zeroed in on clear, concise criteria that would have to be met by the new solution: A WordPress website builder designed for non-technical personnel.
“Our marketing team has limited code knowledge”, admits Rollings. “Bringing everything into a no-code environment was critical as we grew and added additional team members to our team.”
Maintaining and updating the website would largely still be the responsibility of a developer (whether in-house or outsourced). However, a less technical solution (or better yet, a no-code platform) would enable him or her to tackle assignments with far greater ease and efficiency.
Elementor Separating Itself From the Pack
Ultimately, the road towards a solution that best-suited Hive’s needs proved a lot shorter and more straightforward than they anticipated.
Having worked extensively with Elementor for years, Hive’s newly-hired freelance developer immediately recommended the company opt for the most popular code-free WordPress website builder.
“Our new freelance developer who we’ve been working with for over two years recommended Elementor.” says Rollings.“His reasoning was simple: Elementor would give us greater flexibility and visibility into the website backend.”
“Elementor was the solution recommended to us across the board by every developer we spoke with”.
It wasn’t just him advocating for Elementor, however. During the vetting process, Hive’s CMO approached a number of developers who have worked on projects of similar scale and complexity.
Their input? “Elementor was the solution recommended to us across the board by every developer we spoke with.”
After vetting the platform themselves, Hive finalized its decision: The new company website would be WordPress-based and built with Elementor.
All in on Elementor
Right from the get-go, Hive found ample evidence that they had made the correct choice:
“Our developer was totally right – getting pages built with Elementor changed the way we updated, tweaked, and edited pages,” says Rollings. “Elementor is easy to use and beginner-friendly, especially for a team that has freelance developers. All of a sudden, we were able to give them instructions and layouts, and they could build the bones of the pages for us. From there, we can handle the rest.
“Having Elementor at our disposal saved us 7 hours a week of extra back and forth, correcting coding mistakes, and overall trouble that we’ve had with other solutions.”
With Elementor in place, Hive saw an almost overnight, tangible effect in terms of workflow efficiency and decreased expenses.
“Having Elementor at our disposal saved us 7 hours a week of extra back and forth, correcting coding mistakes, and overall trouble that we’ve had with other solutions.”
Assisting experienced web developers to work more efficiently was just the first benefit of adopting Elementor. With a no-code platform now readily available, Elementor proved game-changing for Hive’s marketing personnel, as well:
Currently, 6 marketing team members work on the site and utilize Elementor when they need to create new pages or edit existing content. Changes happen multiple times a week, and it’s easy for our marketer to implement them with Elementor.
This has had a profound effect on Hive’s paid search and user acquisition efforts: “We now direct people from Google Ads to Elementor built pages”, says Rollings. “Sure, not all of this can be attributed directly to Elementor. However, the time saved by Elementor has definitely contributed to our growing authority with Google. when we are able to craft unique landing pages for each ad, and Elementor allows us to do that.”
A Deeper Dive Into the Results
“Our site had an ‘original’ version that was built when Hive was founded, and iterated on until 2020,” details Rollings. Here’s what Hive’s homepage looked like back then:
And here’s a peek at their then pricing page:
“2020 was when we made the move to Elementor,” proclaims Rollings. “We started redesigning several of our site’s hero pages, including our homepage, pricing page, and product features page; all using Elementor.”
Here’s how Hive’s homepage looks today:
And here’s the new pricing page:
And the results of these changes?
“Well…They speak for themselves: Since we’ve started building out our site in Elementor, our site traffic has increased 115%. Before we started using Elementor, we had about 75,000 monthly visitors. Now we’ve doubled that.”
The changes have left quite an impression on website visitors (i.e. existing or potential customers), as well: “It’s easier for potential customers to navigate, and we’re able to create new assets as new features in our product launch with ease. For our features page, for example, we’re able to drive additional traffic and conversions because we can quickly update the page (copy sections and add new features) as new releases come out.”
Elementor has fundamentally revamped Hive’s marketing funnel, too: “A key part of our mid/top of funnel work, Elementor helps us put together landing pages that are often the first thing people see if they’re searching for Hive organically or via Google Ads.
“Elementor allows us to add widgets throughout the page; specifically the kind that leads to lead capturing. This aids conversion efforts across the board and ensures that we’re maximizing our traffic.”
One tool, in particular, has proven vital in Hive’s lead generation efforts. Our developer incorporates shortcode to fully unlock Elementor’s form builder’s potential. The former helps us reach optimum customization for form fills.
“Since we’ve started building out our site in Elementor, our site traffic has increased 115%. Before we started using Elementor, we had about 75,000 monthly visitors. Now we’ve doubled that.”
Hive’s developers rely heavily on the Toggle widget, as well: “[Toggle] enables us to list out Q&A components on our pricing page. We can easily break down questions we’re frequently asked about regarding pricing and the product itself”, says Eugene Barashkov, Hive’s primary developer.
Elementor’s wide array of templates has also served Hive well: “We can easily add in footer and header for pages where they make sense. We want to keep the header/footer consistent and the drag and drop interface enables just that. We also use a Login block template on our homepage, that is the standard login buttons we use.”
Elementor plays a vital role in synergizing both the marketing department’s and developers’ website-related efforts. Giving Hive’s freelance developer the necessary tools is just one side of the picture. According to Rollings, Elementor has empowered her department to actualize sales and marketing vision as it relates to the company website:
“Elementor’s sales-oriented features fill the void felt when approaching WordPress directly. It would be very difficult to add the conversion portions of our landing pages into our old WordPress format, which would hamper lead collection and minimize our efforts. We want to maximize all traffic on-site and Elementor helps us do that.”
Growth and Marketing Agility — Courtesy of Elementor
“Overall, Elementor has been an essential part of our growth as a company. It’s allowed us to move quickly — one of Hive’s core brand tenets. Our flexibility as a marketing team has increased the volume of leads that the business has seen by 2.5x in the last year, which is right around when we began using Elementor to build the majority of our website. We look forward to continued use of Elementor as our team grows, enabling us to scale at an even more rapid pace.”
