Below are some of the projects I have been working on with a brief description of the techniques used and the final results. Some are large projects carried out over a series of months, whilst others are projects completed in an afternoon.
If you have a project in mind, I would love to hear from you to see if we can work together.
2021-02-20
Converting a wordpress site with multiple blog pages to a custom built site that improves load-time several fold and makes the site easier to manage
This project aims to convert a WordPress website to a custom programmed site, with the main objective of improving loading times, as well as making maintenance easier for site admins.
Although WordPress pages offer an easy way to create a website without much experience, it does so with one major drawback: The pages it generates take forever to load.
As it is a tool designed to meet the needs of millions of users, it needs to include features that many do not use on their website; But the code is still there just in case they ever need to use it. The use of plugins makes the situation worse, since each plugin has to include the necessary files for its execution - resulting in the repetition and cancellation of several lines of code before the website is generated on the visitor’s screen.
Creating a custom website allows you to include only the necessary code for that website - often resulting in a drastic reduction in the total size of the web page (in many cases a reduction of 300% - 1000% is achieved in the download size). And as we all know, Google loves pages that load in a few seconds.
Of course, opting for a custom website has its drawbacks - you cannot add new features by installing free plugins on a whim - but by planning the website well from the beginning, you can include everything necessary for the website to work and structure the code in such a way that new modules can be added in the future without many complications.
As the client needed to have control over the constantly evolving contents of his website,, I designed a control panel similar to the system he was familiar with to insert pages and posts, manage categories and upload photos.
I also included client-requested elements such as a template manager, a comment manager, email templates, and a tool to include "snipepts" - Javascript code (like Google Analytics, Facebook plugins etc) on their site.
The result has been a website that scores 96% on the Lighthouse performance test compared to 34% of the original WordPress site.
And not only that, the client says that it is now easier to insert new content on his website and keep it up to date using the new control panel.
