Case study · Hostfully · 2022 → 2026
Symphony
How a two-engineer team rebuilt a SaaS marketing website into the company's main revenue channel. In 14 languages.
- website leads a month since launch
- +22%website leads a month since launch
- pipeline dollars start on the website
- 7 in 10pipeline dollars start on the website
- sales-qualified leads we used to lose
- 1,010sales-qualified leads we used to lose
- mobile load time
- −73%mobile load time
- languages, from English only
- ×14languages, from English only
- Role
- Proposed it and led it, from the first pitch to launch
- Team
- 2 engineers, with design, content, SEO, product marketing and RevOps
- Timeline
- Proposal Dec 2024 · Launch Feb 19, 2026
- Stack
- WordPress (custom theme and 21 plugins), WPML, Salesforce, AWS, AI-first development
Before and after
Same company. A different website.
Drag the divider to compare the homepage before Symphony and today.
Homepage screenshots: January 31, 2026 (archived copy, the last weeks of the old site) and October 2026. The new hero rotates through product animations.
01·The starting point
April 27, 2022.
My first day. hostfully.com was English-only, on an overloaded shared server, split across three domains, with no ticketing system.
mobile PageSpeed in week one, and 24.7 seconds before a visitor could use the page
“Imagine a website without conversion points… only a couple of pages used to have a form.”
02·Four years, four chapters
It didn't start with a redesign.
Symphony was the fourth chapter. The first three built the system it runs on.
Before
Requests by email and Slack. Content split across three domains. A redesign stalled for months at an agency.
After
Jira for Marketing, with automations. One domain. The redesign finished in-house.
- May 12I create Marketing's Jira. 6,684 requests tracked since, 22% opened by automations.
- Sep 15Pages become structured content: one template, change it once, every page updates.
- Oct 1266 landing pages come home from HubSpot subdomains to hostfully.com.
- Dec 13The stalled agency redesign ships, finished in-house.
Before
One developer, manual content production, English only, and a shared server running out of room.
After
An AI-assisted content pipeline, schema, a second developer, Spanish and French, and our own AWS server.
- May 2023An AI-assisted blog pipeline, run by Jira automations: outline, draft, SEO and expert passes.
- Sep 2024The host's ultimatum: our site used 20% of a shared server. Stay for +167% a month, or leave.
- Oct 2024The site speaks Spanish. French follows in December.
- Dec 2024Our own AWS server instead of a bigger bill: 61% lower first-year cost.
Before
Several site versions side by side, heavy GIFs, no real conversion points, four languages.
After
Preprod and weekly releases, a Book a Demo engine, AI video, paid-ads ready, llms.txt, 14 languages ready.
- Mar 13No more editing production live: preprod, QA and a weekly release.
- May 29Symphony kicks off: one design system, simpler pages, animation instead of walls of copy.
- Jun 18A real conversion engine: booking, attribution, CAPTCHA, Salesforce hand-off and lead preservation.
- Sep 24Ready for AI search: llms.txt, then schema, FAQs and navigation built for AI.
- Nov 26Real-user mobile load time rated “Good” for the first time: 2.1 s, down from 4.5 s.
Before
Manual publishing in WordPress. Third-party analytics blocked by consent.
After
Symphony live, PageSpeed 99, cookie-free analytics and a portal that ships content on its own.
- Feb 19Symphony goes live. 14 languages, the same night.
- Mar–AprThe two best lead months since 2023.
- Jun 9PageSpeed 99 on desktop, after caching, AI-crawler rate limits and front-end work.
- Jul 1The Martech Portal: 95% of changes ship through automated importers.
03·Launch
February 19, 2026.
Symphony goes live. In 14 languages, the same night.
- ENEnglish2022
- ESSpanishOct 2024
- FRFrenchDec 2024
- PT-BRPortuguese (BR)Oct 2025
- DEGermanFeb 19, 2026
- ITItalianFeb 19, 2026
- NLDutchFeb 19, 2026
- PT-PTPortuguese (PT)Feb 19, 2026
- DADanishFeb 19, 2026
- SVSwedishFeb 19, 2026
- NONorwegianFeb 19, 2026
- FIFinnishFeb 19, 2026
- ELGreekFeb 19, 2026
- ARArabicFeb 19, 2026
One design system, 23 content types, schema everywhere and a real conversion stack, in a single release. Published items across all languages went up ten times.
04·Business impact
What it did for the business. Measured in Salesforce, not page views.
website leads a month since launch, against the 2025 average.
Cumulative website leads since launch vs. the 2025 monthly pace. March and April 2026 were the best lead months since 2023.
inbound sales-qualified leads come through the website in 2026.
sales-qualified leads a month since launch.
pipeline dollars start on the website.
74% of pipeline created and 71% of deals won, Jan 2024 – Oct 2026, including paid-ads landing pages. Percentages only, by design.
sales-qualified leads we used to lose.
Visitors who started a demo request but never booked used to vanish. Lead preservation keeps them in the pipeline: 3,802 leads since 2024, and almost one in three website SQLs this year.
Share of website SQLs from lead preservation
05·Speed
Fast where it matters. On a phone.
Feel the difference
How long a visitor waits for the page on a phone.
Chrome UX Report, real-user p75 LCP on the mobile homepage, played at real speed (the pages are an illustration). Best weekly reading, 28 days to Sep 26, 2026; in October it reads 1.8–2.0 s.
PageSpeed
Desktop
from 43 in 2022
Mobile
from 16 in 2022
Lighthouse. Desktop peaked at 99 in June 2026; mobile is the median of three runs in October 2026.
The fastest homepage in our market.
Real-user load time on phones, against the six platforms Hostfully compares itself with.
- 1Hostfully1.43 s
- 2Competitor1.64 s
- 3Competitor1.75 s
- 4Competitor1.76 s
- 5Competitor2.05 s
- 6Competitor2.45 s
- 7Competitor4.86 s
Chrome UX Report, p75 LCP, average of 12 weekly readings, Jul–Oct 2026. Fastest in 9 of the 12 weeks.
A bigger bill, or our own server.
In 2024 our host said the site used a fifth of a shared server. We moved to AWS instead of paying more.
to stay on shared hosting
first-year cost on our own server
today, also running preprod, the portal and internal tools
06·The system
21 tools. Two engineers. AI-first.
Instead of stacking more SaaS subscriptions, we built what the business needed on our own platform: 1,671 commits since June 2025, about 78% of them mine.
- Jun 2025Symphony theme
- Jun 2025Self-serve signup
- Jun 2025Book a Demo engine
- Jul 2025Form shortcodes
- Aug 2025Lead-gen tools site
- Oct 2025Landing-page generator
- Nov 2025Promotions engine
- Dec 2025Glossary importer
- Dec 2025Testimonials
- Dec 2025Webhooks
- Jan 2026FAQs
- Jan 2026Partner promotions
- Jan 2026First-party analytics
- Mar 2026Video library
- Apr 2026Dashboard
- Apr 2026Partner program sync
- Apr 2026Webinars
- Jun 2026Raw HTML pages
- Jun 2026Martech Portal
- Jun 2026Real-time data bridge
- Sep 2026Widgets
July 2026 · The Martech Portal
1,065items in one week: the biggest release in the company's history.
Content syncs from its real sources and waits for approval. Nobody has to open WordPress: about 4,250 items so far, 95% through automated importers.
work closed a month
Jul–Sep 2026 vs. 2025. Without portal auto-logs, still +21%.
median to close a teammate's request
Down from 60 during the rebuild. 37% now close within a week.
releases, since March 2025
Before, changes were made straight on production.
content types
One template each: change it once and every page updates.
Content at scale
- FAQs, crawlable and translated
- 683FAQs, crawlable and translated
- glossary terms, imported in a day
- 303glossary terms, imported in a day
- integration pages from one template
- 1,966integration pages from one template
- published items across languages
- ×10published items across languages
07·Design & media
A site that shows instead of tells.
lighter than the GIF it replaced
Motion, not walls of copy
Vector animations for the key features, then a move to AI-generated video shipped as light WebM loops.
launch and ad videos in 2026
One AI video pipeline
The pipeline built for the homepage now makes product-launch videos and their cuts for social and paid ads.
feature icons, one visual kit
One design system
Built with the design team for Symphony, replacing three site versions that used to coexist.
08·The team
Built as a team. Led end to end.
I proposed Symphony, planned it and led the build with the second engineer on my team. It shipped because the whole marketing team built it with us.
- Development & infrastructure
- Preprod, deploys, performance and tracking, with the second engineer on my team
- Design
- The Symphony design system, typography, feature icons and imagery
- Animation & AI video
- Lottie animations first, then AI-generated video
- SEO, content & AI visibility
- Schema, the blog, reports and LLM visibility
- CRO & web content
- Conversion data and the pages behind both redesigns
- Product marketing
- Copy for features, launches and pricing
- Demand generation
- Paid search and social, ad landing pages and lead routing
- RevOps
- Salesforce attribution, lead data and the revenue data platform
“It's not a mistake. It's a missing process.”
More case studies
Every figure on this page traces back to a system of record: Salesforce, Chrome UX Report, PageSpeed captures, WordPress databases, Jira and git. Business figures are shown as percentages or indexes.