That Fellow Digital

The brief

Our own website was the weakest thing we had to show anyone.

It ran on Avada, a WordPress page-builder theme. It 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 this was not a good look.

The constraint was that the site was already indexed. Seven pages, ten portfolio entries and nineteen blog posts all had addresses that existed in Google, and a rebuild that lost them would throw away years of ranking.

What we did

Rebuilt it as a static site in Astro. The layout is decided when the site is built rather than in the visitor’s browser, so there is no page-builder engine to ship and nothing to execute on arrival.

The booking calendar was the one piece of heavy third-party JavaScript worth keeping, so it now loads only when someone clicks to book. Until then the page carries none of it.

Every old address was mapped before anything moved. Portfolio entries went from /portfolio-items/ to /work/, the blog moved under /articles/, and all of it redirects permanently. WordPress was archived rather than deleted, so rolling back is a single command.

We also fixed things we had stopped noticing: body text that failed the accessibility contrast standard, and theme demo content that had been sitting publicly on two pages for years.

The result

	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 cut to get there. There are more pages now than before.

You are reading it. Every number above is measurable from your own browser’s developer tools, which is the point: this is the one case study you can verify yourself without taking our word for it.