In a highly competitive industry, timing is everything. If your web page takes longer than a second to load, or appears slow from a visitor's point of view, you're losing out to a competitor.

In this case, my client had a website made in Wordpress, with several plugins to achieve the design and functionality she needed. She really liked the design, but knew that his web page took almost 10 seconds to load.

She also had to wait the first time she loaded her website, but on subsequent visits the website seemed to load very quickly. Because her files were already stored in the memory (cache) of her computer she never experienced the delays that first time visitors were experiencing.

New visitors found the page slow - in many cases abandoning the page before engaging in any interaction.

Once my client realised the situation, she commissioned me to create a new optimised website.

I explained the advantages and disadvantages of making a custom page instead of relying on WordPress: She would have less autonomous control of the design, but would gain a lot in loading time. She pointed out to me that the vast majority of content was updated infrequently, and that she always called an agency for design changes.

We worked on the new optimized design for 3 months, completely freeing ourselves from WordPress but taking care to maintain the links and directory structures so as not to lose positioning in google on the indexed pages.

We improved by over 40% in google metrics. The abandonment rates dropped significantly and thanks to the improved visitor experience, their search engine rankings improved as well.