Okera: Enterprise-Grade Web Presence Through Hyper-Growth and Acquisition

Client: Okera (acquired by Databricks)
Industry: SaaS, Data Governance & Security
Timeline: Launched April 2022
Services: Web Design, Custom WordPress Development, Performance Optimization, Technical SEO

The Challenge

Okera was a data governance pioneer selling to enterprise buyers, the kind of audience that judges a vendor’s engineering by everything it touches, including the marketing site. Backed by $29.6 million in funding and named a Gartner Cool Vendor in DataOps, the company had reported 374% growth in net new bookings and 150% net dollar retention the year before the rebuild. Its website could not keep pace: a commercial page-builder theme carrying more than a dozen plugins made every change a fight, and the performance ceiling that builders impose was at odds with a brand whose product promised precision and scale.

A company in a hyper-growth phase has a compounding version of this problem. The site has to change constantly (new pages, new messaging, new campaigns) and every change has to ship fast without degrading performance. A page-builder foundation makes each of those demands harder over time.

The Approach

  • A bespoke WordPress theme, designed and engineered from the ground up, replaced the page-builder stack entirely. Purpose-built templates meant new pages could be created quickly without wrestling a builder, and without inheriting its bloat.
  • Lightweight, semantic code with clean asset loading maximized site speed and Core Web Vitals, matching the engineering standards of a world-class enterprise tech brand.
  • A high-performance technical SEO framework gave the site peak search visibility and frictionless user paths, so the growing volume of enterprise buyers researching data governance found Okera, and found a site that loaded like the product worked.
  • A scalable foundation built for change: structured, maintainable architecture that Okera’s team could extend rapidly as the company grew.

The Results

Comparing archived copies of okera.com from the week of launch, the homepage HTML fell from roughly 252 KB to 106 KB and the plugins loading on it from fourteen to three. The rebuilt site then carried Okera through its most demanding period: continued growth, new product launches including Okera for Snowflake and OkeraEnsemble, and the scrutiny that comes with an acquisition process. Thirteen months after launch, in May 2023, Databricks announced it was acquiring Okera, and through all of it the site delivered the speed, search visibility, and enterprise polish the moment required. A digital presence built to scale proved it could.

Key Takeaways

Enterprise buyers read your website as an engineering sample. For a technical product, a fast, precise, well-structured site is evidence. A sluggish builder-based one is too.

Hyper-growth punishes rigid foundations. The faster a company moves, the more expensive page-builder friction becomes. A purpose-built theme turns site changes from a bottleneck into a routine.

Build for the company it is becoming. Okera’s site was engineered for scale it had not reached yet, which is why it held up when growth, and then an acquisition, arrived ahead of schedule.