Our clients are always surprised when we tell them that their slow-loading website could be hurting their bottom-line. This case study gives an overview of what our team here at Infusion IT did to achieve such a great outcome. Our client has asked us to keep the details anonymous.

 

What was the problem and how did we tackle it?

 

Our client, based in the UK and within the financial sector contacted us to ask if we could investigate a loading issue with their Website. They went on to explain that on many occasions, the Website took up to 10 seconds to fully load and occasionally displayed a 500 HTTP error. They were also actively running Adwords campaigns but were only just making a profit. Our team agreed to take a look and fix the issue. Our first job was to run some speed tests using Pingdom to determine the average loading times. The initial results were as follows: –

 

Tested from Sweden via Pingdom

 

Test #1: 8.7 seconds
Test #2: 7.9 seconds
Test #3: 7.1 seconds

 

Average load time: 7.9 seconds.

 

Fig 1.0 (Pre Optimisation)

 

As you can see, the load time of our client’s site on average, loaded in around 7.9 seconds which is very slow. Our next step was to investigate as to why it was loading so slowly. On further investigation, we discovered that our client’s Website was hosted in the US even though their core customer base were from the UK. They were also using shared hosting with Godaddy who are renowned for overselling their servers. We knew right away that moving the site from the US to the UK would increase the load time considerably. We also suggested moving away from shared hosting to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) which would give another noticeable speed increase (we advise hosting only non-critical or non-business Websites on shared hosting). Shortly after building an optimised, UK VPS and migrating our client’s Website we performed another Pingdom speed test: –

 

Test #1: 2.9 seconds
Test #2: 2.6 seconds
Test #3: 2.4 seconds

 

Average load time: 2.6 seconds.

 

Great! That’s a 5.3 second improvement by just moving the Website from the US to the UK and moving away from shared hosting to an optimised VPS. But we weren’t finished yet. Our next task was to dig deep into our client’s Website in an attempt to locate, fix and optimise the underlying codebase. The core site was built with WordPress so we instinctively knew there were several improvements we could make right off the bat. We installed our diagnostics tools and discovered there were several slow database queries caused by two WordPress plugins. Luckily, this was an easy fix as the client no longer required them. Additionally we found redundant code within the Websites core theme which we also removed.

 

Test #1: 1.9 seconds
Test #2: 1.6 seconds
Test #3: 1.7 seconds

 

Average load time: 1.7 seconds.

 

That’s nearly another second off the load time. Our final task was to remove and optimise the resources on the site. For example, our client had a portfolio with images. These images were huge and had to be streamlined. We finally added caching on the VPS and on the site itself. Here were final results: –

 

Test #1: 610 milliseconds
Test #2: 585 milliseconds
Test #3: 605 milliseconds

 

Average load time: 600 milliseconds.

 

Fig 1.1 (Post Optimisation)

 

We performed these changes back in January 2018. Our client informed us that within a week, their business had increased their conversions and doubled their ROI. They were thrilled. Another happy client.

 

Can Infusion IT help your business? Speak with one of our team today and let’s see what we can do for you.