In the dynamic world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the technology curve is imperative.
That’s part of what drives Art & Science, a full-service digital agency and winner of WP Engine’s inaugural ‘Headless Project of the Year’ partner awards.
To find out more about the innovative work Art & Science does and the details behind the agency’s award-winning work, we spoke to Art & Science Technical Director Peter Toi to see what’s behind his company’s success.
Thank you, Peter, and congratulations on the Partner Agency award. Before we get into those details, tell us more about the origins of Art and Science and its core abilities.
Art & Science began in 2011 as The Juice Agency, a digital marketing agency at the benchmark of strategy, user experience and technology innovation. We rebranded as Art & Science after acquiring a leading SEO/PPC company based in Toronto in 2013. Art & Science combines the creative inspiration of the artist with the analytical rigor of the scientist.
Over the past 13 years, we’ve grown into a full-service digital agency. We’re proud to be the #1 Clutch digital agency in Canada, a Google Premier Partner for 2023, and ranked as one of Canada’s top 500 growing companies four years in a row.
Our core competencies include brand strategy, creative advertising, website development, e-commerce strategy, SEO and CRO performance, media plans, shopping and reporting, and innovative, experimental projects.
How has your partnership with WP Engine impacted the company’s growth and success?
Art & Science has been a member of the Organization’s Affiliate Program since 2018, but our relationship with WP Engine goes back several years before we started using WP Engine as our primary WordPress hosting platform. Funny enough, I still remember the first time I was introduced to WP Engine as a sponsor and speaker at a Toronto WordCamp many years ago. From that first interaction, I considered WP Engine to be the gold standard of managed WordPress hosting, and they have lived up to my first impressions ever since.
Hosting with WP Engine gives us peace of mind and allows us to focus on areas where we deliver value, such as providing strategic insights to clients, thinking creatively, and building award-winning sites. As a creative company, we don’t necessarily want to spend our time working on infrastructure and hosting management.
At the same time, many of our solutions are highly technical and require support for Git workflows and pipelines, high-performance CDNs, and enterprise-grade caching and security. WP Engine has provided us with right-sized solutions for all of our WordPress projects.
It’s been great to see WP Engine solutions grow with us and continue to support companies like us. Plugins like Smart Plugin Manager allow us to focus our energy on creating value for our customers rather than maintaining the status quo.
The support we receive as an organization through our participation in the Organizational Partner Program has absolutely contributed to our growth and success. The support we receive from WP Engine, both technical and sales support, is consistently top notch.
Our account management and sales support teams have been important partners in pitches, helping to create hosting solutions where security, traffic or business requirements are scrutinized. Instant access to Level 1 support has also been invaluable, whether we need performance profiling or other troubleshooting.
And I can say, without hesitation, that support from our account manager and access to key members of the Atlas team were critical to getting Embark’s website up and running under tight time constraints.
Could you share some insight into the Embark project, which was a headless WordPress project, and the decision-making behind it?
The Embark project is a perfect example of our full-service capabilities. Our client wanted to rebrand, focusing on a new messaging platform to differentiate themselves in the RESP financial services sector. This required comprehensive support including branding, campaigns and website development.
With that in mind, the decision to go headless was obvious. As a modern financial services company, our client’s digital footprint included a website, a customer portal and the potential for a mobile app in the future. Headless architecture enables content distribution from a single CMS to a variety of platforms. This flexibility in content distribution and delivery was definitely one of the main reasons we chose headless and WP Engine Atlas for this project.
Plus, our client had already mentioned headless early in the discovery process as an approach they wanted us to consider, so it was a pretty easy conversation.
The decision to use WordPress was made because it was a platform the marketing team was familiar with. WordPress is, of course, ubiquitous on the Internet and among marketing teams and companies around the world. So familiarity, ease of editing content, and the evolution of API integrations, both RESTful and GraphQL, were good reasons to choose WordPress.
Headless was also attractive for this project because of the increased security we achieved thanks to an API-only content solution.
WordPress—when properly developed on a platform like WP Engine and handled by a development team that knows what they’re doing—is a very secure platform. Knowing that we could limit access to the backend by delivering all content through an API allowed us to implement additional security measures, minimize plugins, and enforce stricter rules for development.
What were some of the technical challenges and triumphs on the Embark project?
One of the main challenges was to ensure high performance, which was difficult given the four-month time frame. Four months is tough to build a site of this size and complexity, and even tougher when it includes performance optimizations, content import, and SEO and tracking implementation. And all this was done on a relatively new platform and new technology.
What stood out here was the support we got from WP Engine. I can’t thank our account manager enough for the affiliate support they gave us and the WP Engine technical team we worked with. They helped us stick to our schedule and avoid weeks of trial and error to develop best practices and optimizations. We’ve had direct contact with support who have been incredibly responsive – our success is certainly due in part to the high level of support we’ve received.
This was especially true when it came to achieving impressive API performance with response times < 100 milliseconds. It also happened as we leveraged WP Engine's caching mechanism and WPGraphQL's smart cache. Once we enabled the entire caching pipeline and refactored the build process and code so that everything was compatible, we saw a 6,000x performance improvement between our first releases and our last. The site is blazing fast thanks to all this work.
Can you tell us more about winning Headless Project of the Year? What is the impact of this recognition?
Winning this award is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team. It recognizes our efforts to stay current with the latest developments in web development, reduce technical debt for our customers and set them up for long-term success. It is also a recognition of our commitment to keeping our skills up-to-date and ensuring our clients receive modern solutions that help them maintain their digital presence in the future.
But the website is only one part of this huge undertaking. Indeed, the entire team at Art & Science should be recognized for the hard work they put in to ensure this project was a success.
Everyone at Art & Science – from the strategic and creative teams that developed a beautiful brand with a travel metaphor, to the technical teams that brought it to life and the customer service team that managed the project throughout – worked together to make it this project success. I also want to thank Embark Student Corp. who invited us to work together to shape the future of students in their post-secondary journey. Big visions help make great work possible.
As a technical director, I’m over the moon that we won an award for headless project of the year! We are always adapting to changes in the technology ecosystem and environment. This is a huge validation of our efforts to adapt and innovate in our industry.
Thank you, Peter, and congratulations to Art and Science on this well-deserved award!
Learn more about the WP Engine Affiliate Program—the largest WordPress agency ecosystem—here or visit WP Engine to learn more about our fully managed WordPress platform.
