Matt Lerner, former marketing director at PayPal, was exasperated. His plugin-reliant website was giving him endless hassle in the form of laggy load times, security scares, and costly maintenance. What he needed? A fast, resilient platform that let him take care of SEO and focus on growing his business.

The business 

After helping PayPal’s marketing team achieve phenomenal success, Matt moved from Silicon Valley to the UK to head up their SMB arm. In the process, something became very clear to him: It wasn’t enough for a startup to simply have a good product—plenty of those companies fail everyday. The lucky few that make it have one thing in common: they invest in strategies that pay off in the long-run. 

This is exactly why Matt founded SYSTM (formerly Start Up Core Strengths). With 15 coaches on staff, SYSTM’s mission is to help early-stage businesses find their big growth levers—and pull them. This is how SYSTM helps about 60 startups a year to double down on their most impactful work and drive growth that’s both profitable and scalable. For all these reasons and more, Matt’s weekly newsletter is widely regarded as an industry must-read, and is consumed religiously by leaders at the likes of Harvard, Google, and Amazon. 

Matt Lerner, Founder of SYSTM

The SEO challenge 

According to Matt, there’s free like a beer—and there’s free like a puppy. Unfortunately, SYSTM’s first business website was built on a platform that was free like a puppy. Needless to say, this resulted in a lot of unpleasant surprises for Matt and his team. 

“So you don't actually pay money for WordPress, but I ended up paying thousands of dollars to a developer in India to build the thing. And then of course, it was all plugins jacked together in weird ways so that I had to pay her to maintain it. And then I had to pay for GoDaddy hosting which already, by itself, costs more than Wix,” Matt shares.

As a professional marketer, Matt also found it extremely frustrating that he couldn’t so much as change a header on his site without something going wrong. Overall, he found the platform costly, hard to use, and worst of all for his SEO—it was slow. This was particularly painful for potential customers in other countries who didn’t necessarily have great caching and page load acceleration. 

As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, Matt’s attention was also being diverted from his business because of late night security calls—despite the fact he was paying for plugins that were supposed to protect his site.  

“WordPress sites are constantly attacked, so you have to make sure all your plugins are always up-to-date. Even then, my site still got taken over and I ended up having to pay an offshore security firm hundreds of bucks a month to be there on retainer in case my site got hacked again. I’m not technical, so this is not stuff I want to be dealing with. I want to focus on running my business.”

The solution 

Matt decided to re-build his business website on a platform that was known for enterprise-grade security, lightning-fast load times, and intuitive SEO features. He enlisted the help of a Wix Partner, Julia Dudnitska to help him make the move and re-design his site. 

Wix now offers a far more user-friendly and cost-effective solution for Matt’s value-driven business. “If Wix did nothing else other than really fast, bulletproof hosting that would already be worth it, but it goes far beyond that. It's been great to set up and work with,” he enthuses. 

One of the biggest advantages that Wix offers Matt is the flexibility to optimize his weekly blog post from inside the Wix Editor—no plugins or tech support needed. He finds the AI-powered recommendations from the SEO Assistant particularly helpful. 

“There's a bunch of SEO fill-in-the-blank tools right there in the panel,” he describes. “They’re super intuitive for a non-expert to use. Whenever I create a post, I just go in and it helps me identify the right keywords, come up with the right URL slug and preview text, and everything else I need to optimize my post.”

Results 

As well as saving Matt a hefty $300 a month and hours of needless stress, his Wix website is now faster and more secure by design. A content refresh also helped it rank for a slew of new terms. The result? Matt’s business has succeeded in increasing its organic traffic by 800% and upping online conversions by 138%. 

“Overall, it's just been fabulous. I've got customers all around the world and never had a single complaint about page speed. It's unbelievably fast and I've never had any security issues—they haven’t even crossed my mind. The fact that I get all of that for tens of dollars a month is an unbeatable bargain. It’s one of those checks that I'm just perfectly happy to pay every month and know I'm getting a lot of value for it.”

Matt is so happy with his decision to move to Wix, he now enthusiastically recommends the platform to startups he advises. He uses it as a real-life example of how to make value-driven business decisions. “I say forget Webflow, forget WordPress. Get on Wix and just cross all these things off your list of stuff to worry about.”

Learn more about the Wix SEO features that help Matt scale his business and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts.