Scoops of Favor is revolutionizing the way we enjoy ice cream with their lactose-free and vegan-friendly offerings, made possible by a strong digital presence powered by Bluehost.
With Bluehost’s exceptional support and tools, Scoops of Favor has successfully connected with a wider audience and scaled their business effectively.
Based in the heart of the community, founder Jessica Griffin launched Scoops of Favor out of a personal need and passion for ice cream that everyone can enjoy, regardless of dietary restrictions. Determined to make ice cream a treat for all, Jessica began crafting delicious, inclusive flavors catering to lactose-intolerant and vegan ice cream lovers.
We recently caught up with Jessica to discuss the challenges of creating such specialized products, her journey with lactose intolerance, and the pivotal role her WordPress website, hosted by Bluehost, plays in connecting with customers and scaling her business.
About Scoops of Favor
Jessica Griffin: “The inspiration behind Scoops ice cream stemmed from my own lactose intolerance. I adore ice cream, but often it doesn’t reciprocate that love! So, I started this company to enjoy my ice cream freely and without discomfort.”
Inspiration Behind the Business
Jessica explains, “Like many, I’m lactose intolerant, which makes enjoying traditional ice cream a challenge. This limitation sparked my motivation to create a product I and others like me can enjoy without hesitation. Moreover, we also cater to the vegan community by offering dairy-free options. Our goal is to ensure no one misses out on the joy of Scoops ice cream.”
Primary Goal of Scoops of Favor
“Our primary goal at Scoops of Favor is to make ice cream enjoyable for everyone again,” Jessica says. “Many people abstain from ice cream due to lactose intolerance or vegan preferences. By removing these barriers, we hope to reintroduce the simple pleasure of eating Scoops ice cream to as many people as possible.”
Check out the video below to hear directly from Jessica Griffin, founder of Scoops of Favor, about her inspiring journey.
Choosing Bluehost for Web Hosting
Jessica Griffin has been with Bluehost for about six years. She decided to stay because of our exceptional customer service and responsiveness, which are essential for her as an entrepreneur juggling various responsibilities.
Currently, Scoops of Favor is on our shared hosting plan, but as the business grows, they plan to move to cloud hosting to better meet their expanding needs.
Resolving Issues with Bluehost
“There was one instance where I couldn’t access my website due to a problematic plugin,” Jessica recalls. “A customer alerted me that they couldn’t see my site. In a panic, I called Bluehost, and they were fantastic. They helped me troubleshoot the issue, which turned out to be a third-party plugin causing the problem. They guided me through deactivating and updating the plugin to resolve the issue.”
Overall Experience with Bluehost
“My experience with Bluehost has been incredibly positive,” Jessica notes. “They are patient and thorough, which is a huge relief for someone who isn’t the most tech-savvy. Their team makes the technical aspects of running a WordPress website much easier for me.”
Business Growth Since Launch
Even though Scoops of Favor has only been around for a year, they’ve seen significant growth, much of which can be attributed to having a stable and accessible online presence facilitated by Bluehost. Jessica appreciates our reliability in crisis situations, especially when technical issues could impact her business operations and sales.
The growth has been incredible over the past year. We have continuously provided new plugins and tools that enhance the aesthetic and functionality of their site. We’ve also helped optimize the loading speed, which is crucial for customers who want to order Scoops ice cream without delay.
Additionally, their SEO rankings have improved significantly, making Scoops of Favor a top result for lactose-free ice cream searches.
Working with Our Design Team
We didn’t just follow Scoops of Favor’s cues and builds; we used our tools and then demonstrated how we did it to teach them. This collaboration has been crucial in laying a solid foundation for their future growth. We helped Jessica learn better ways to build and optimize the site while reflecting the authentic brand values. This has enabled them to maintain the essence of Scoops of Favor while enhancing the site’s performance and usability.
Consulting and Leveraging Tools
We spent a few weeks consulting with Jessica to understand her goals and help her leverage our tools and plugins effectively. We introduced her to Bluehost WonderSuite, Yoast SEO, and YITH’s WooCommerce plugins, which have been instrumental in boosting her business.
Jessica is hands-on in every aspect of her growing business, from ingredients to Instagram, packaging to pricing, and branding to bulk orders. While our team delivered a design refresh that fully embraced Scoops of Favor’s brand and story, we wanted to make sure Scoops of Favor continued to get sweet treats and scalable technology that any staff could take advantage of without deep experience in web design or long hours learning.
When Jessica wanted a simple way to post a few upcoming popup events, we knew there were plenty of robust and complex event plugins for WordPress. But for Scoops of Favor’s needs, a sprinkle of WonderBlocks using smart semantic structure for SEO was more than enough.
We showed Jessica how she could take something like our job listing WonderBlocks patterns and swirl them into a simple event listing – something we liked so much we launched a few new patterns we built for Scoops of Favor for all Bluehost customers earlier this year.
Performance Improvements
After running a performance and SEO audit, our Bluehost experts were able to reproduce Scoops of Favor’s beautiful branding and polished design originally built with Elementor using WordPress Blocks and Bluehost WonderBlocks designs. This approach allowed us to cut out fillers and focus on serving Jessica’s story using long-lasting, high-quality ingredients.
By leveraging image compression, identical webfonts in modern formats, native WordPress blocks, and Bluehost WonderBlocks designs, we managed to dramatically increase performance by cutting download sizes by about 66-75% across various pages, often while increasing media content on the page.
For instance, on their homepage, we added three VideoPress videos and multiple high-resolution images. Despite these additions, we managed to cut the total downloaded resource size by over 85 percent.
Impact on Speed and SEO
Every business is about number-crunching somewhere along the way. In website hosting, cutting the speed index by over 30 seconds and the First Contentful Paint (FCP) by over 5 seconds makes a huge difference.
Additionally, we improved the Lighthouse performance score from 36 to 98 on mobile and 55 to 100 on desktop. This means Scoops of Favor visitors aren’t seeing Jessica’s spread of Scoops ice creams and slick branding slowly melt onto a screen, and search engines are seeing a speedy business to rank higher.
Initial Decision to Choose Bluehost
Jessica switched to Bluehost after a disappointing experience with another hosting provider, whose service lacked responsiveness and effectiveness. When she encountered issues with them, their support was unhelpful, prompting her to seek better options. That search led her to Bluehost, and she hasn’t looked back since.
Favorite Aspect of Being a Bluehost Customer
Jessica says, “My favorite part is definitely the support and commitment I receive from their team. Knowing I have such reliable backing gives me peace of mind, which is priceless as a business owner. Bluehost’s support has been consistently impressive, demonstrating their dedication to my success.”
Future with Bluehost
Jessica sees a long-term partnership with Bluehost. We have been instrumental in their current success, and she fully expects us to be part of their journey as they continue to grow. As their business expands, they plan to transition to cloud hosting to better accommodate their increasing traffic and service demands.
Bluehost isn’t just a service provider; we’re a vital part of their business ecosystem. Our reliability ensures that their website is always accessible, and Jessica trusts us to resolve any technical issues that may arise.
Their journey with Scoops of Favor is just beginning. They’re aiming for small-city domination, drop shipping, and perhaps even the Shark Tank stage. With Bluehost and our WonderSuite, they’re starting this new chapter from a great footing, ready to conquer new challenges.
Inside the Powerful, Pint-Sized Website Serving Big, Bold Flavors
In tech, we often talk about technology stacks or recipes for solutions. After our team’s incredible positive experience with Scoops of Favor, we recommend stocking your freezer, but we’ll share a few key ingredients to the “Scoops Stack.”
Key Ingredients of the Scoops Stack
Some key ingredients from Bluehost include:
- Bluehost Pro WordPress Hosting with Ecommerce Addon: A great place to start before jumping into Bluehost Cloud!
- Bluehost WonderBlocks: Found on all WordPress plans and WonderCart ecommerce solutions found in our ecommerce hosting or addon.
- YITH WooCommerce Premium plugins: Including Subscriptions and Product Add-ons & Extra Options
- Yoast SEO Premium: Local and WooCommerce
Sweet Solutions From Our Partners
And some of our partners have sweet cravings too and brought some sweet solutions to the table including:
- Jetpack Premium
- Jetpack Boost
- Jetpack Protect
- Jetpack CRM
- Jetpack VideoPress
- Akismet Anti-Spam
Techniques to Improve Any WordPress Website
Some of the specific techniques we used to improve Scoops of Favor can be applied to any WordPress website at Bluehost, whether built using WonderBlocks, Elementor, or another page-building solution:
- Use modern image formats: Like WebP and SVG with careful compression.
- Use modern WOFF2 webfonts: Over the older TTF font format.
- Increase visual interest: Using grid layouts instead of lists, and color and type treatments to pop information instead of images to avoid bursting page speed scores.
Are you looking to build a reliable website for your business? Get started with a Bluehost hosting plan or consult with our Pro Design Live Experts to get expert assistance with your WordPress website.
