Cyntergi Finds 4x Page Speed Boost and Exceptional Support After Migrating to Kinsta

Cyntergi is a web directory and marketplace created to make shopping at small businesses easier and faster. Cyntergi brings the convenience of finding everything you need in one easy-to-navigate site and allows customers to shop by location and find incredible small businesses nearby.

Joseph Heath created Cyntergi during the COVID-19 pandemic when small businesses were struggling with sales. He knew most people shop on Amazon or Walmart because it’s easy to find what they are looking for, and it’s all in one place. With Cyntergi, he wanted to bring that idea to a small business platform. By making the platform affordable, he hopes to create sustainability and accessibility for small businesses.

In addition, Cyntergi values the work nonprofits and charities do to improve communities. They donate 10% or more of their proceeds to charities and nonprofits making a difference, with monthly updates on their social platforms.

Check out our interview with Joseph Heath, Owner of Cyntergi, to learn more about their experience with Kinsta.

Snapshot

• Industry: Retail
• Number of Employees: 1-5

The Problem

Cheaper isn’t better. Cyntergi learned this the hard way after hosting their site with Bluehost and SiteGround, wherein they experienced slow website load times, unscalable hosting, and slow ticket-style customer support. Going for cheaper hosting services created more problems for Cyntergi.

“When we first created Cyntergi we used Bluehost – which was horrifically slow. We were unable to get an LCP under 3 seconds. As a start-up company with limited funds, we were looking for the most affordable web hosting. While the price was very cheap, after just a month we decided to switch to SiteGround as obviously, cheaper isn’t better.

SiteGround hosting did offer improvements with both speed and customer service over Bluehost, but we were still unable to get an LCP under 1.5 seconds. While the price was great, it was not nearly as fast as I needed it. For what I hope Cyntergi to be one day, I needed a web host that could potentially keep up with the traffic while providing sufficient speeds.

The SiteGround dashboard was also an improvement over Bluehost, but definitely not as advanced as the Kinsta dashboard. The SiteGround customer service was much better than what we had with Bluehost, but it was still a ticket-style system that took time to get a response. Especially when it’s a complex issue, and they need more information, going back and forth can take a lot longer than anyone trying to build a website would like. It created problems with the businesses I was helping set up when it took over a week to resolve anything due to the back and forth.”

The Solution

By migrating to Kinsta, Cyntergi said goodbye to slow load times, poor customer support, and headaches. They felt confident that they could manage their site and business with Kinsta’s scalable, secure, and speed-oriented infrastructure.

“During our search for a good WordPress host, we found multiple articles that showed Kinsta was the fastest WordPress host and had 100% uptime. This was what we were ultimately looking for. It fit the needs of our dream of large-scale hosting.

The fact that Kinsta uses Google servers and has 100% uptime and strong security was a really big deal when you’re dealing with an ecommerce-style business. Combining that with the fact that scalability was what we were looking for made Kinsta the best choice. All around it was worth the investment and gave us better confidence in our website.

We also found that Kinsta had a vast knowledge base with tests and comparisons on different WordPress plugins and configurations. When you’re trying to build a complex website 100% on your own, having a source of unbiased information that truly knows what it’s talking about comes in handy. It also gives you confidence in Kinsta as a company because they’ve demonstrated their knowledge of WordPress.

Another feature we really liked with Kinsta was the managed aspect. Any time we need to make a change we can just open a new chat, let Kinsta’s customer support know what we need to do, and they can make sure it happens. It takes just a couple of minutes and you are good to go! Anyone looking to build a website with Kinsta has someone that will help handle editing complicated files in a safe way. You don’t have to be an expert because of how user-friendly the platform is.

Beyond that, the fact that they include Kinsta’s CDN powered by Cloudflare with all of their plans is a bonus. You don’t have to do anything or set anything up. Just hit “yes” and watch the speed times improve.”

The Result

From 1.6 second LCP to 500ms, Cyntergi saw a dramatic 4x improvement in load time speed and achieved a perfect score on GTmetrix after switching to Kinsta. 

“We noticed a dramatic increase in speed after we switched to Kinsta. It went from a 1.6 second LCP time to an average of just under 500ms. Almost a 4x increase in speed, which smashed our goal of getting it down to 1 second. As we’ve seen the traffic on our website grow, the speed does not seem to change, either. There has also been perfect uptime on our website. Even with the query loop on our home page, a large image, and more images below to direct customers to our small business blogs, we have a load time of under 500ms (and we’ve seen as low as 380ms).

For a complex website, being able to load this fast while still getting a perfect score for structure is phenomenal.”

“The customer service at Kinsta has been amazing. The instant chat feature is something we have utilized on plenty of occasions and they have always been very helpful and have responded quickly. Compared to other companies that require you to submit a ticket and wait up to 48 hours for a response, this is something that makes a difference in a world of instant gratification expectations. When we have to wait a week to answer a question for one of our customers, it’s hurting our business and theirs, which defeats the purpose of Cyntergi. Kinsta has eliminated that problem for us, and I’m sure many other businesses.

We had to have our service adjusted to serve WebP and AVIF images through ShortPixel, which they handled in just a few minutes! Being able to simply open a chat and tell them what I need and have them make those changes all within a few minutes was so helpful!”

“Through Kinsta we’ve built an amazing website and have blazing-fast load times, which allows us to get more creative with our page design.”

“Just below our main header, we have a query of listings on our homepage giving shoppers a few listings to look at and a button to bring them to all of our small business listings.”

“Because of the benefits Kinsta offers with Edge Caching and Cloudflare CDN, the only performance plugin we are using is Perfmatters, which actually comes from someone who worked at Kinsta before they started their own venture.

That, combined with ShortPixel to serve new image formats, means we are able to have a super fast website without having bloat and excessive plugins to try and optimize our website. Not only does this save money, but it also reduces threats to your website because you have fewer openings for any kind of attack.

This gives us the freedom to have more functional plugins, which bring great features to our vendors and shoppers, ultimately creating a better experience on our website.”

We would rate Kinsta a solid 5 stars as it’s the only hosting we recommend for serious businesses looking for a high-quality hosting company.

Joseph Heather, Owner
Cyntergi