Harvest Timber’s CEO is a long-time friend of our CEO and they reconnected after years of running side by side in business across the country from each other.

Glen came to us with a problem we’re more than familiar with, an extremely slow WordPress website.

We knew Glen’s style was heavy on graphics, which are a burden on load times when done improperly.

Glen came to us with a very loaded down website with load times ranging between 7 seconds & 15 seconds on a 4g LTE connection. That’s REALLY slow and can truly deter users on slower connections from even getting past the first page.

We have a go-to strategy that we’ve developed for slow WordPress sites, but Glen’s wasn’t typical. We had a wishlist from him stating that we needed to keep the graphics & videos while ramping up the speed.

Glen’s website came to us with a unique issue. It had over 20 images + 4 videos just on the home page that the client really felt needed to stay to keep his style showcased for their prospective clients.

We consulted with Glen and came up with the strategy to keep the gorgeous look of the site while honoring the fact that site speed was causing his business to not blossom.

For Glen’s site, we were able to remove the header slideshow, which reduced the load on the site tremendously. We reduced the site by 10 images in just that one move. (Side note: We’re not a fan of sliders in the header of a home page, they don’t get the message needed to users fast enough and they’re more likely to bounce, scroll, or click to a new page before waiting for slides to scroll. Not to mention, they require several scripts and graphics to make work, which slows your website dramatically).

Once we had the final list of graphics that were going to be needed for Glen’s site, we downloaded them all and began optimization. Using GTMetrix.com we grabbed the specifications needed for each image on the site and began resizing the images. We found that EVERY image was uploaded at 300dpi (Straight from a DSLR, images come at a higher resolution with 300 dots per inch. Websites are best run with 72dpi or dots per inch), and that they were several thousand pixels wide x tall. We reduced the images to 72dpi & resized them to fit exactly where they’re going on the site and ran them through compression using GTMetrix.

With the images fully compressed we sent them back up to the website and reran our tests. That shaved 3 seconds off right away!

After handling the heavy issue of graphics we moved to the more technical issues on the site:

• We moved several scripts that were loaded in the header to the footer of the website, ensuring that they worked one by one and that the site didn’t look glitchy as it loaded as well.
• Removed query strings from various scripts & stylesheets that weren’t needed
• Combined javascript files into as few as possible files to reduce assets needed to load the site
• Combined CSS files into a singular stylesheet (from 8 resources needed to load the site to 1)
• Minified HTML, JS, & CSS
• Turned on the website caching

Typically we’ll use a secret weapon for all of the above tasks called WP Speed of Light, though we can tell you from experience, that is something you’ll want to back up before running on your site.

After a laundry list of technical tasks from server management, site changes, and client interactions we came to complete our SEO project. Below you’ll see a before and after of the efforts: