Our own website was the worst advertisement we had.
It ran on Avada, a WordPress theme with a drag-and-drop page builder. It looked fine. It also weighed 1.4 megabytes, made 41 network requests, and shipped 703 kilobytes of JavaScript to every visitor before they read a word. It took 3.4 seconds to finish loading.
We rebuild sites for a living. So we rebuilt ours.
The numbers
Same content, same booking flow, same domain:
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Page weight | 1,445 KB | 105 KB |
| Requests | 41 | 18 |
| JavaScript | 703 KB | 0 bytes |
| DOM elements | 779 | 269 |
| Load time | 3.37 s | ~0.2 s |
Nothing was removed to get there. The work is still all on the site, the booking calendar still works, there are more pages now than there were before.
Where 1.4 MB actually goes
It is almost never images. On our old site the single largest cost was JavaScript: 703 KB of it, most belonging to the page builder, a slider plugin nobody had used in years, an embedded social timeline, and a contact form that loaded an invisible bot-check on every page whether or not that page had a form on it.
A page builder has to ship a general-purpose rendering engine to the browser because it cannot know in advance what you will drag onto the page. That is the trade. You get to move boxes around, and every visitor pays for the machinery that let you move them.
The new site is static HTML. The layout is decided when the site is built, not in the visitor’s browser, so there is nothing to ship.
The embarrassing part
While auditing our own content we found that our Articles page had been publicly displaying the sentence “Avada has been the #1 selling theme for 5 years with over 350,000 satisfied customers”. That is the theme vendor’s demo copy. It had been sitting on our website, live, for anyone to read.
Our About page had five separate blocks of lorem ipsum on it, plus a heading that read “I AM BRILLIANT” and an uptime counter with no number attached to it. All theme demo content, imported once during setup and never cleared out.
We are telling you this because it is worth checking your own. Search your site for “lorem ipsum”. Search it for the name of your theme. Demo content is easy to leave behind, it can sit there for years, and you stop seeing it long before your customers do.
We also found that our body text was a light grey on white, at a contrast ratio of 3.67 to 1. The accessibility standard is 4.5. Anyone reading our site on a phone in daylight was working harder than they needed to.
What we would tell you before doing this
Rebuilding is not automatically the right answer.
If your site is slow because it is hosted badly, moving hosts is cheaper than rebuilding. If it is slow because of three specific plugins, removing three plugins is cheaper than rebuilding. We say this on discovery calls regularly, and it costs us work.
Rebuilding is the right answer when the platform itself is the constraint: when the page builder is the weight, when you cannot edit the site without breaking it, or when the design has aged past the point where tweaking helps.
What the URLs did
We kept every address. Case studies moved from /portfolio-items/ to /work/, and every old URL
redirects permanently to its new home. The blog moved under /articles/. Old sitemap paths redirect
to the new sitemap.
That part matters more than the design. A rebuild that changes URLs without redirecting them throws away whatever search ranking the old pages had earned. If you are quoted for a rebuild, ask what happens to your existing URLs, and be wary if the answer is vague.