How a Smarter Hosting Partner Helped Japan Ski Experience Increase Traffic by 162%
-
Table of Contents
- Identifying a Market Gap
- How а Slow Website Can Cripple Your Business Growth
- Turning a Crisis Into an Opportunity
- Switching to SiteGround: Dramatic Performance Improvements
- Beyond Speed: A Complete Online Ecosystem
- The Results: From Traffic to Revenue
- User-Friendly Website Management
- Key Lessons for Building a Digital-First Physical Business
- Digital Foundation for Continued Growth
When our client Lindsay Colbert first fell in love with Japan’s legendary powder snow in 2004, she had no idea that her passion would turn into a thriving international business. Today, Japan Ski Experience serves customers across Australia, the US, Asia, and Europe – mainly thanks to its well-developed online presence. With a steady year-over-year website traffic growth on SiteGround, Lindsay’s proving that with the right online strategy and the right hosting provider, even the most niche business ideas can achieve global success.
Identifying a Market Gap
Lindsay’s entrepreneurial journey began with a simple observation: Japan’s skiing was extraordinary, but international ski tourism there was just emerging. At the time, she was teaching English in Japan, but quickly found a business partner who was already working in Japan’s most renowned ski resort, and they began taking bookings. The timing wasn’t perfect, launching during the 2008 financial crisis, but they had a clear vision: to connect skiers from around the world with Japan’s unmatched snow experience.
How а Slow Website Can Cripple Your Business Growth
As Japan Ski Experience grew year over year, Lindsay discovered a painful truth many successful offline businesses face: their online presence was holding them back.
“We paid a lot of money for a very slow website. Because we had such a slow, clunky website, which we had so little control over, we were dependent on pay-per-click advertising in order to get business and to drive people to our website.”
In the beginning, their website was integrated with their travel agency booking software, managed entirely by a third-party company.
“The whole website was managed and hosted not by anything under our own control, but via the company that we had our travel agency software with. Our team in Japan would be sending panicked emails saying, “Help our website’s down”. We don’t know what’s happened. We had no control over it.”
Japan Ski Experience was trapped in a digital death spiral: pouring money into expensive paid advertising to compensate for a slow, unreliable website that drove customers away. Then the pandemic hit, Japan closed its borders to international tourism for two and a half years, and the business faced complete collapse.
Turning a Crisis Into an Opportunity
The pandemic forced Lindsay to completely rethink their digital strategy.
“I realized we were going to need to try to find a way to get business without paying huge amounts for pay-per-click advertising. For that, I wanted to improve our SEO.”
But with their existing slow, uncontrollable website, SEO improvements were impossible.
“When you have a clunky website that’s really slow and you’re not doing well in SEO, there wasn’t much else I could do to the website. We tried optimizing images and everything like that. But with that hosting and that technology we had at that time, it wasn’t possible.”
Lindsay made a bold decision: to completely rebuild their online presence from scratch.
“I made the decision during the pandemic to completely start with a brand new website and brand new hosting. Because we had no business for two and a half years, we could put some time, effort into doing that.”
Switching to SiteGround: Dramatic Performance Improvements
When Lindsay decided to use the pandemic downtime to build a completely new website with full control, she partnered with a web design and development agency that recommended SiteGround as their hosting provider.
On SiteGround Japan Ski Experience’s website started showing consistent performance improvements on both desktop and mobile. During their first year as a SiteGround client, their traffic increased by 162%, which converted directly into more bookings.
“SiteGround is obviously designed to get websites working really fast. It’s got lots and lots of features we were able to tap into to make our site’s performance 64% faster.”
- GTmetrix Grade: Improved from E (56% performance, 48% structure) to A (92% performance, 98% structure)
- Loading Times: 1.3-second load times with 10ms server response times
- Reliability: Zero downtime incidents
Another major improvement since switching to SiteGround in 2022 is the elimination of downtime, which is a stark contrast to the frequent outages they experienced with their previous platform.
“We haven’t had any downtime happen since we’ve been on SiteGround.That’s been a massive change for sure.”
Beyond Speed: A Complete Online Ecosystem
Japan Ski Experience’s website rebuild focused on creating a comprehensive digital ecosystem built on reliable hosting infrastructure – one that Lindsay and her team could fully control, optimize, and scale as their business grew. Despite being on a tight budget in the beginning, with SiteGround, they could start small and scale up.
“We were on a budget because we had no income. So, we started with the GrowBig plan and then upgraded to GoGeek and then to Cloud hosting as our business grew again.”
Key features that supported their growth included:
- Scalable hosting plans that grew with their business
- Comprehensive caching for optimal performance
- CDN capabilities for their international customer base
- Reliable technical support that eliminated previous frustration
SiteGround’s CDN became a critical component of Japan Ski Experience’s international strategy, helping to deliver optimal performance to customers across their main markets – Australia, the US, China, and Singapore.
“A CDN is super important to us because we’ve got an international client base.”
The Results: From Traffic to Revenue
The numbers tell a compelling story of digital transformation success:
“The percentage increase in terms of our business is consistent. You can track it from the increase in unique visitors to the increase in inquiries to the increase in conversions into bookings pretty steadily. The increase in traffic to our website has directly resulted in higher conversions and more inquiries, and more bookings. We’ve got way more traffic than we ever had with PPC. It’s been really successful.”
User-Friendly Website Management
Despite not having a technical background, Lindsay appreciates SiteGround’s Site Tools and its intuitive interface.
“Site Tools is very intuitive and easy to understand. I like that there’s an explanation at the top of each of the features. You click on the features on the left-hand menu, and then you can see across the top, it explains it in language that I can understand.”
This accessibility allows her to stay involved:
“It’s easy for me to kind of keep on top of where we’re at, what’s happening, what could be improved.”
Key Lessons for Building a Digital-First Physical Business
Lindsay’s journey offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs building businesses – offline or online – around passionate expertise:
Start with authentic expertise
“I fell in love with the skiing and snowboarding” – genuine passion for your subject matter creates authentic marketing and customer trust.
Invest in scalable hosting infrastructure early
“When you’re starting out on the journey then you need something which is affordable first and foremost, but you can start it off small with SiteGround and then build it up as you go through the growth as the business grows.”
Prioritize performance over features
“You can start off quite basic, but it’s still reliable and gives you the support you need, and then you can grow it as you go along.”
Turn limitations into opportunities
The limitations brought on by the pandemic sparked innovative thinking, which ultimately strengthened Japan Ski Experience’s business model.
Digital Foundation for Continued Growth
Today, Japan Ski Experience continues expanding its digital capabilities.
“We’re looking at having our own booking system, which is completely separate from our website. And it looks like we’ll be able to host that on SiteGround as well, within the same account. So it’s so flexible that it provides so many different options as your business grows.”
This flexibility exemplifies what Lindsay values most about their hosting choice – a platform that evolves alongside business needs rather than constraining them.
“Not all solutions are suitable from the beginning right through to when you’ve grown bigger and SiteGround grows with the business.”
Japan Ski Experience’s success demonstrates that with the right digital foundation, passion-driven businesses can achieve remarkable global reach and sustainable growth.
“Getting that traffic, having the SEO, having the speed and the reliability and the user experience. It all flows through into an increase in booking revenue, which is the end goal.”
Comments ( 0 )
Thanks! Your comment will be held for moderation and will be shortly published, if it is related to this blog article. Comments for support inquiries or issues will not be published, if you have such please report it through our official channels of communication.
Leave a comment
Thanks! Your comment will be held for moderation and will be shortly published, if it is related to this blog article. Comments for support inquiries or issues will not be published, if you have such please report it through our official channels of communication.