The Arcane Bear website provides investment tools, resource and educational materials in relation to cryptocurrency markets.
This project was focused on WordPress speed performance improvements after Arcane Bear approached us with a website in need of urgent help. WordPress Speed scores were very low for the site in testing tools like GT metrix and Google Page Speed scores. As a user browsing the site it was obvious the site was loading slower than necessary and was impacting user experience.
The solution to fixing a slow WordPress website is almost a multi-faceted approach…
- For the website itself, the theme and plugins were severely out of date and updating them broke the site. So we first worked with the heavily customized theme built back in 2017 to get it working with the latest version of WordPress. Then we were able to update all the plugins and WordPress Core.
- On the server, the PHP version was outdated and there were warnings from their hosting provider that the php update was going to be mandatory shortly so getting this fixed was an urgent matter. Updating php also required further modifications to the themes files to meet the new stricter system. Happy to say the server is now running on php 8.2 which is more secure and makes WordPress load faster.
- We then focused on a plugin audit to see what plugins were actually being used on the site and removing deactivated plugins that were not planned to be of use. As is usually the case, many active plugins were either not being used on the website or were in conflict with each other, compounding page load speed issues.
- Lastly, we set up WP Rocket for wordpress optimization, caching and file minification as per WP Engine’s best practices.
- Some other icing on the cake items were to stop woocommerce related scripts from running on the home page, slowing down the rate of WP Heartbeat, setting up a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and removing inline styles from the head tag and into the main stylesheet.
The end result is the WordPress slow page load issue is now resolved and the website loads faster which is a huge improvement for user experience and search engine rankings.
In performance testing after our WordPress performance work was completed the website went from a below average grade of C minus to an A+ in GT Metrix!
It’s a real pleasure working with Arcane Bear and looking forward to more projects in the future.
