This was a website optimization project for Marina Kay Portraiture. The client complained that her website was loading very slowly and our initial assessment showed that the website was indeed taking a long time to load – about 13.7 seconds on average. Given that a lot of people run out of patience and abandon the site after 6-7 seconds, this was a legitimate cause for concern. We went ahead and did a full backup of the website and proceeded to optimize it thoroughly, optimizing the images, combining and minifying the CSS, HTML and JS files, removing all the unnecessary plugins and assets. The website was also showing a “Your connection to this site is not fully secure” error which we also fixed, thus further improving the website’s SEO rank. The client had also voiced some concerns about an email she received from a random person threatening to ruin her website’s rank if she doesn’t add a link to his website on hers. While it wasn’t really a real cause for concern, understandably the client was worried and wanted to make sure the security of the website was solid. We had the threatening email forwarded to Google’s anti-phishing team and proceeded to implement additional security measures on the client’s website, including:
- Integrating CloudFlare on the domain
- Hiding the admin login page URL
- Implementing anti-brute force rules
- Disabling comments to prevent spam
We ran website performance reports before and after our optimization work, and you can see the result below. The GTmetrix score went from F to A, the performance score went from 39% to 99%, the Largest Content Paint time went from 13.7 seconds to 0.76 seconds (over 18x improvement).
