Genesis for Small Businesses: A Case Study

Rebecca Gill is a well-known leader in the WordPress community, and she’s been building websites and offering SEO expertise for more than 15 years. While numerous tech trends have come and gone over that period, The Genesis Framework has remained a constant for her since her agency’s launch in 2009. 

For those new to the WordPress ecosystem, Genesis is the most popular framework for building WordPress themes in the market today. At its core, Genesis is a code framework library and toolkit used to facilitate the development of performant WordPress themes, but it’s really much more than that.

Unlike other theme frameworks, Genesis offers both designers and developers a quick and easy way to build beautiful, professional-grade WordPress themes that load super fast, and its sleek, simple approach to theme creation is one of the reasons it’s become so popular. Today, Genesis-built themes are among the most widely used within the WordPress community and Genesis itself has a global and active community of developers.

For Rebecca, Genesis has also been central to her consulting business, which has helped thousands of clients over the years. Those clients have ranged from small, mom-and-pop shops in need of their first website, all the way to enterprise-level customers looking for help refreshing their outdated, legacy web properties. No matter what they’re looking for, Rebecca said, Genesis-built themes are often the right fit for the project. 

“Genesis themes are just so flexible,” she said, “they let me build really great-looking sites and get my customers up and running incredibly fast.” 

A recent example of this was a client Rebecca took on in late 2019, who had requested an SEO website audit. It didn’t take long to see that this particular client was in need of more than a quick SEO check-up. The website infrastructure was so outdated, a complete refresh was required.

“The site was really kind of a hot mess,” Rebecca said. ”It was being hosted by another party, so the client didn’t have full control, and basically, they needed me to move them over to a new environment and do some serious clean up.” 

So, she did just that. Rebecca moved the client to a new hosting provider, and then, working in a staging environment, she used the Genesis-built Mai Law theme as the foundation for a new site. 

“I was able to bring all the existing content over as is, and make the site more usable—for both humans and search engines, because both were clearly having trouble doing so previously,” she said. 

Rebecca also performed additional, minor maintenance, which included cleaning up the client’s overrides for red blue text, tweaking existing meta titles, and configuring Yoast. 

“But at the heart of the website clean up,” she said, “it was really just the theme.” 

 And for such a relatively light lift, the results paid dividends. 

“The site saw an immediate burst of traffic,” Rebecca said, “and it wasn’t just at that moment, this was sustained traffic.” 

In fact, after the new site launched in December, the traffic boost was so significant, the site saw a 1000% increase in page views between November 2019 and December 2019 and December 2018 and December 2019.

November to December 2019 Growth

December 2018 to December 2019 Growth

The underlying reason, Rebecca said, was the strong code base found in Genesis-built themes like Mai Law. 

“Genesis has an incredibly strong code base, and it’s solid from both an SEO and a security standpoint,” she said. “It has everything you need to launch a healthy website.”

It also makes for quick work. The client mentioned above came in as a lead in mid-October, and the site relaunch went live on December 2.   

“My clients usually come to me because they need help cleaning up a mess,” Rebecca said. “It’s a usability issue, it’s code they can’t easily change, maybe they’re struggling with their current developer.” 

“I feel like I get to liberate them from those problems and many more. Using a Genesis-built theme, I’m able to give them the freedom to do what they truly want with their sites because suddenly, they have an independent theme that’s easy to tweak and customize to fit their needs. 

Want to find out more about the Genesis Framework and the ways you can put it to use? Visit WP Engine to find out more and check out our whitepaper: Getting Started with the Genesis Framework for an in-depth guide to using Genesis for your website.