Snapshot
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.
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.
The Process
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. They knew that the only way to see the performance improvements quickly was to adopt an entirely new stack. The QuickBridge team chose Hygraph because it was a straightforward, flexible system that empowered the development team to work quickly to develop a new site.
Why Hygraph?
The Quickbridge team chose Hygraph for the following reasons.
Intuitive Content Modeling
The flexible content modeling possible with Hygraph made it easy for the team to work efficiently to build their content structure using the no-code Schema Builder. Structured content enabled them to build reusable content, saving content editors time when deploying changes. With this new approach the Development team was able to model and structure the data that the Content team needed. From there, the content team is able to create and update content without the help of the development team.
Intuitive UI
The UI reduced the learning curve for both the development and content teams who were able to dive in and start working without a steep learning curve. Hygraph’s 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 Hygraph Custom User Roles and Content Views.
Webhooks
Hygraph webhooks make it easy to deploy new changes quickly. This drastically improved their development time. The new static architecture gives the team peace of mind that pushing an update can be done seamlessly without a lot of hassle.
The Current Setup
After considering both Open Source Vs. SaaS options, the team chose to build a static website using Gatsby, a static site generator for the frontend, Hygraph to manage the content and backend, Cloudfront as a CDN, and AWS Amplify to build and host the website.
Switching to the new stack with Hygraph drastically improved these key indicators for performance and SEO on the QuickBridge site. Previously, the QuickBridge website scored 30 for mobile and in the 70s using Google PageSpeed 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.
Results and benefits
Google Page Speed Insights improvement of 141%-266%.
Easy to build a schema and data structure that fits your needs with the flexibility of Hygraph
Editor features which keep the content neatly organized and easy to use, like Filtering and Content Views, create an intuitive content editing experience
Clean UI and simple workflows enable speedy content publishing without dependence on the development team.
Webhooks enable speedy development and deployments.