From Sluggish to Lightning Fast

This business was running a WordPress site built in 2016. It loaded in 7.8 seconds on desktop and over 12 seconds on mobile. The PageSpeed score was a dismal 31, and Google was penalizing them in search rankings.

Visitors were leaving before pages even finished loading. The bounce rate sat at 68%, and the average session lasted just over a minute. They were losing potential customers every single day.

The technical debt was significant: 23 active plugins (many conflicting), a theme that hadn't been updated in 3 years, unoptimized images averaging 2MB each, no caching strategy, and shared hosting that couldn't handle traffic spikes. The site would crash during busy periods—exactly when they needed it most.

Rather than patching the existing WordPress installation, we recommended a complete rebuild with Next.js. This modern framework delivers pre-rendered pages at the edge, eliminating the database queries and PHP processing that made the old site crawl.

We started with a thorough content audit. Not all 23 pages needed to exist—some were duplicate content hurting SEO, others were outdated. We consolidated to 16 focused pages with clear user journeys and calls to action.

Every image was converted to next-gen formats (WebP and AVIF) with responsive sizing. What was 45MB of images became 3MB. We implemented lazy loading so images only load when scrolling into view, and used blur-up placeholders to eliminate layout shift.

The new site deploys to Cloudflare's global edge network—over 300 data centers worldwide. Users in Tokyo and Toronto get the same sub-second load times. And because it's static HTML, there's no database to crash, no server to maintain, and no hosting fees.

We preserved all their existing URLs with 301 redirects, maintaining their hard-earned SEO authority. Within 3 months, organic traffic increased 67% as Google rewarded the improved Core Web Vitals.