Case study: How Burning River Digital gave their client full control of their website with WPBakery
Holly Heritage, founder of Burning River Digital, and her team helped their client, Sciarappa Construction, fix a website that they couldn’t update. Built with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and locked by the original developer, even the smallest changes required outside help.
By using WPBakery, they were able to redesign the homepage and integrate it with the existing setup, without having to start from scratch. Now, the client has full control over their site, and Holly’s team – a new, go-to solution for all their website content management needs.
Burning River Digital: A performance-driven & Google-certified agency
Burning River Digital is a US-based digital marketing agency founded by Holly Heritage.
Burning River Digital website. Source: Burning River Digital
Holly started the agency after years at larger agencies, where she saw a need for a more agile and collaborative approach to client partnerships.
I founded Burning River Digital with the belief that digital marketing should be both performance-driven and highly collaborative.”
Her agency now works closely with brands of all sizes and industries to deliver both enterprise-level strategy and hands-on execution. Yet, a high majority of those projects have lead generation and e-commerce goals, where precise targeting and strong data frameworks are key.
Our approach is data-first, focused on driving measurable results for our clients.”
Burning River Digital is also a Google Premier Partner – an honor awarded only to the top 3% of agencies in each country. This is thanks to them consistently delivering strong results across Google Ads and the Google Marketing Platform, and is reflective of the scale of accounts they manage.
For clients, it means they’re working with an agency recognized for excellence and innovation — with direct access to advanced tools, beta features, and dedicated Google support.”
The challenge: A locked website & a lack of flexibility
One of Burning River Digital’s regional clients, Sciarappa Construction, came to them with a common but frustrating issue. They had a working website, but it was practically unusable.
The biggest challenge was the lack of flexibility.”
Built with ACF, the site had all content fields locked by the original developer. The client couldn’t even update basic content, like updating text or swapping an image, without going through external developers. It was costly, slow, and inefficient.
They were frustrated by being locked out of basic edits, which slowed their marketing efforts and forced them to rely on outside developers for every change.”
This created bottlenecks, additional costs, and prevented the client from being nimble in their communications.
The solution: Integrating WPBakery into the existing setup
The team at Burning River Digital needed a CMS tool that could:
- Integrate with the existing ACF setup,
- Offer a powerful but intuitive drag-and-drop editor,
- Empower their non-technical client to manage their own site moving forward,
- And to have all that, without having to rebuild it completely from scratch.
The client needed a website that reflected the quality of their construction work and, just as importantly, one they could actually control and update.”
After researching solutions, they chose WPBakery Page Builder.
Why WPBakery?
The team at Burning River Digital follows trends closely in CMS and marketing technology (MarTech) tools, and saw that WPBakery is widely recommended in the WordPress community for its versatility and scalability.
WPBakery consistently stood out as a solution that agencies of all sizes trusted for client work.”
The integration also allowed them to preserve the underlying ACF structure while layering WPBakery’s visual editor on top. It also allowed them to redesign the homepage without having to rebuild it completely, and gave the client a way to have full control over their site.
This gave our team full creative freedom to redesign the homepage quickly and cleanly, while also handing the client an interface that didn’t require coding knowledge to maintain.”
They did, however, run into one issue – a problem with mobile alignment due to the legacy locked settings. Luckily, WPBakery’s support team was able to quickly step in, review the site, and provide a custom CSS fix that resolved the issue.
WPBakery’s support team was fantastic. … It was a great experience — responsive, professional, and genuinely invested in solving our problem.”
The result: Empowered client, faster delivery
Once the changes were implemented, it was immediately clear to both the client and the agency that they had chosen the right tool for the job.
Sciarappa Construction website homepage. Source: Sciarappa Construction
For Sciarappa Construction:
- They could finally make changes on their own, and that didn’t require coding
- They saved time and money by not having to rely on external developers for simple content updates
- With the newfound control, their internal marketing efforts became faster and more responsive
The client was thrilled. For the first time, they could log in and make updates themselves without calling us for every adjustment.”
For Burning River Digital:
- They were able to cut down development time significantly
- They avoided building custom workarounds or starting from zero
- The project was delivered faster, at a lower cost, and with a higher satisfaction rate on both sides
- They had more time to focus on higher-value work like strategy and design
WPBakery cut down our development time significantly. … This efficiency allowed us to hit deadlines faster, reduce costs for the client, and ultimately improve satisfaction on both sides.”
Key takeaways
- Burning River Digital was able to redesign a locked ACF-based site without having to rebuild it with WPBakery
- WPBakery gave the client full control over their content. It also saved them time and money they could redirect into marketing, instead of paying a developer for every small change, which was the case with their previous setup
- WPBakery’s support team quickly resolved a mobile responsiveness issue and provided a custom CSS fix, allowing Burning River Digital to not have to build a custom workaround
- Using WPBakery allowed Burning River Digital to cut development time significantly, and freed up their time to focus more on higher-value tasks like strategy and design
WPBakery offers the flexibility agencies need and the usability clients appreciate.”
We initially found Burning River Digital through Holly’s review on G2, where she shared how WPBakery helped them with a very challenging situation, and that they will be using WPBakery for all their website CMS needs from now on. So, we could not wait to reach out to learn more about her experience.
We thank Holly Heritage again for collaborating with us and invite you to check out her team’s work at Burning River Digital.
If you want to talk with us about your experience with WPBakery, don’t hesitate to reach out.
