Case Study: GraphCMS and Quickbridge

Updating our technology stack with GraphCMS allowed us to drastically improve our page load times and improve our SEO, making us significantly more competitive on mobile devices.

Jonathan RomanowskiSenior Staff Software Engineer at Quickbridge

QuickBridge is a leading alternative business lender providing short-term working capital loans for small to mid-sized businesses nationwide across the US. The company emerged from the idea that America’s small business owners deserve a quick, simple, transparent solution for accessing business funding.

141%
Performance improvement on desktop
266%
Performance improvement on mobile

With over 10,000 customers served and more than $750 million in loans funded since its inception, QuickBridge is a trusted name in the small business lending space providing loans to a variety of industries, from bakeries to construction companies and juice bars to dairy farms. As more businesses demand a fast, mobile-friendly website and the financial industry becomes more competitive, QuickBridge was faced with the task of updating their technology stack to meet their customers’ expectations.

About the Project

The QuickBridge team chose to reevaluate its Wordpress-driven tech stack after noticing consistently long page load times and prioritizing mobile experience and SEO. This led to evaluating new options for the tech stack of the marketing website and all of its content. After considering both open source and commercial options, the team chose to build a static website using Gatsby, a static site generator for the frontend, GraphCMS to manage the content and backend, Cloudfront as a CDN, and AWS Amplify to build and host the website.

Results

QuickBridge’s previous website was lagging behind with long page load times, especially on mobile devices. Performance was critical for improving SEO and reducing bounce rates. Switching to the new stack drastically improved these key indicators for the QuickBridge site. Previously, the QuickBridge website scored 30 for mobile and in the 70s using Google Page Speed Insights. With the new stack, their website now scores in the 80s for mobile and 99 for desktop. This new tech stack dramatically bettered the page load time and SEO for QuickBridge: a 266% improvement on mobile and a 141% on desktop. These all around improvements were so successful, that QuickBridge’s parent company, National Funding has decided to do a second project with GraphCMS.

Why GraphCMS

GraphCMS provided the QuickBridge team with a straightforward, flexible system that empowered the development team to work quickly to develop the new site. The clean UI of GraphCMS reduced the learning curve for both the development and content teams who were able to dive in and start working without a time-consuming onboarding process. GraphCMS filtering capabilities made the content easy to find and use. Filtering ensured the content team would only see content that was relevant to them. Collaboration with external consultants was further improved thanks to the GraphCMS user roles and Content Views. Custom user permissions remove the risk of accidental errors in the process of development and content creation safer.

• Google Page Speed Insights improvement of 141%-266%.
• Building a schema and data structure that fits your needs is easy with such a flexible tool.
• Content is neatly organized and Filtering and Content Views make the content editing experience personalized.
• Clean UI and simple workflows enable speedy content publishing without dependence on the development team.
• Webhooks enable speedy development and deployments.
• Drastic improvements to page load times.