Our Website Went on a Diet (and Lost Over 70% of Its Weight)
The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes
Confession time: the website of a company that fixes slow computers was… slow. On a phone, our home page took anywhere from 3 to 8 seconds to load. That might not sound like much, but on the web it’s an eternity. Most visitors give up after about three seconds, and I remember when we waited three minutes for a single picture to come down over a 2400-baud modem. Times have changed. Patience has not improved.
So we did what we tell our clients to do: measure first, then fix what the numbers say is broken.
What Was Slowing Us Down
When we put our old site under the microscope, three culprits stood out:
- Too much luggage. Our home page asked every visitor’s phone to download almost 2 MB of material, including 31 separate style files and around 15 scripts, before it could show much of anything. Every one of those is another trip across the internet, and phones on cellular connections feel every trip.
- A slow kitchen. Our hosting was on an inexpensive shared server. When a page wasn’t already stored in our content delivery network (a fancy name for copies of your site kept close to your visitors), the server took 2 to 3 seconds just to start answering.
- Fancy entrances. Several sections slid and faded onto the screen. It looked slick on a desktop, but on a phone it meant content stayed invisible until all those scripts finished loading.
None of these is unusual. In fact, this is the most common situation we see: a site that looked great when it launched and quietly gained weight over the years, one plugin and one animation at a time.
What We Changed
We rebuilt the site from the ground up so that each page is prepared ahead of time and delivered as a simple, finished file from a global network, instead of being assembled on a busy server every time someone visits. Along the way, we:
- Cut the luggage by more than 70%. The home page dropped from roughly 1.9 MB to about half a megabyte, and those 31 style files became one.
- Compressed every image. Our pictures went from 10 MB to under 2 MB in total, and phones now get smaller versions sized for their screens.
- Kept the moving parts optional. The background video on our home page only plays on larger screens, has a pause button, and stays still for anyone whose device is set to reduce motion.
- Made it accessible. Every page now scores 100 out of 100 on Google’s automated accessibility check, and we wrote an accessibility statement explaining what we did and how to tell us if anything gets in your way.
- Closed doors we weren’t using. Our new site has no login page, no database, and no plugins to keep patched. That leaves far less for the automated attack tools we wrote about in What Hackers Want From Your Website to poke at.
The Results
Using Google’s own mobile speed test, which simulates a mid-range phone on a slow connection:
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Performance score | 59 to 76 | 85 to 87 |
| Time until something appears | 2.6 to 5 seconds | about 1.7 seconds |
| Main content on screen | 4.2 to 7.8 seconds | about 4 seconds |
| Data downloaded | about 1.9 MB | about 0.54 MB |
On a real phone with a decent connection, pages now pop up almost instantly. More importantly, the speed is consistent: there’s no longer a slow server waiting in the back room for the unlucky visitor who arrives first.
How Fast Is Your Website?
You don’t need to rebuild your site to make it faster. Here’s the same checklist we used:
- Measure it. Go to PageSpeed Insights (opens in new tab), enter your address, and look at the Mobile tab. Run it two or three times, since the numbers bounce around.
- Check your images. Photos straight off a camera or phone are often several megabytes each. Resized and saved in a modern format, the same picture can be a tenth of that.
- Count your plugins and add-ons. Each one may add its own scripts and styles to every page. If you’re not using it, remove it.
- Go easy on animations. Things that slide and fade in can make your content wait.
- Look at your hosting. Inexpensive shared hosting is fine for many sites, but if your server is slow to answer, no amount of tuning will hide it. A content delivery network such as Cloudflare helps a lot.
If that list makes your eyes glaze over, that’s what we’re here for. We’ve been making technology behave since 1993, back when “high speed” meant 56k.