Creating Fast & Responsive Optimized WordPress Websites

WordPress offers small business an affordable content management system which, with a number of free and low cost these makes the platform easy to design and build. It’s so successful that many professional web designers and even some larger businesses us the platforms for blogs and web design. However, with thousands of customisable plugins and themes, plugins and widgets, it’s not always the fastest of platforms once a website is up and running.

The Challenge

A number of our clients came to us because they were struggling to speed up their WordPress site, despite trying everything they could think of. Many had already asked other professionals to help them with their sites, but they had seen limited success. In most cases all the standard optimization had been implemented already, with plugins installed and configured and scripts and styles minimized. Even where sites appeared to load quickly Google PageSpeed insights suggested otherwise, and these low ratings affect SEO performance. Most of our clients who had asked for additional help had been told by other specialists that there was nothing else that could be done to help.

Before starting to work with any of our clients we make sure that we can help, so in all these cases we assessed the potential to improve the site’s performance first. For all those clients (nine so far and counting!) we were confident we could find ways to make improvements. We outlined what this work would involve and the anticipated improvements afterwards. Our clients often ask us for this sort of support as they know it is hard to achieve and they value our open and honest way of working.

Our Approach

With specialist expertise we are able to make fixes which are not described in any of the WordPress manuals. Our solutions are not just about finding ways to improve page speed, we make sure we understand the algorithms of site performance evaluation. After all, it is these algorithms and not the actual download speed which are taken into account when websites are ranked in search results.

This means that there are two separate activities that need to be undertaken. Website speed needs to be looked at because it affects sales conversions, while Google PageSpeed results affect SEO performance. Our solutions, though different for each client, seek to address both these issues.

The Results

It is difficult to achieve the highest performance scores (90 – 100) for WordPress sites, most of our clients were struggling to even achieve 20. Some mobile scores were as low as 5, even after other professionals had tried to help. Many of our clients had been told that nothing more could be done.

In nearly all cases we have managed to at least double the performance scores, sometimes making a six-fold improvement with most websites scoring between 40 and 80 once we had completed our work. Given that 90% of all WordPress sites are seeing those really low 5 – 20 scores we’re delivering a strong competitive advantage for our clients which translates into better page rankings and improved sales conversions.

About Us

Our creative team will design and develop eye catching, virally optimized websites that are custom coded from scratch. When you hire us, you are plugging in to a team of digital strategists, marketers, designers, and developers to help you reach your growth goals.

For over 10 years, we've been creating high-performance websites that deliver the ultimate digital experiences for our clients. We believe that creating customer-centric experiences based on UX best practices, market research and user testing is a great way to achieve the best possible results.