With mobile traffic gaining more and more traction every year, website performance is extremely important for today’s websites. SEO ranking depends on it a lot, as well as many other factors that content authors need to account for. Equitas Law’s website needed some work, especially with load times on a mobile device. Running the website through GTMetrix yielded a PageSpeed score of below 70%, with a YSlow score of around 59.
Performance Updates:
The first thing we did was check what was hogging so much of the page size on initial page load. Most commonly it is images, which the site definitely suffered from, but what was surprising was the sheer amount of javascript and CSS libraries being loaded as well. After compressing every image we could find, we looked further into the JS/CSS issue. Many installed WordPress plugins were simply loading all kinds of fonts, libraries, and style-sheets that were never being used on the page. Moga went through each plugin’s settings to configure, and sometimes semi-hack them, to minimize the amount of references being made. On top of that, we used certain WordPress plugins to combine as many of them together as possible to cut down the amount of concurrent HTTP requests being made on load. We also implemented a new caching strategy using suggestions from the GTMetrix analysis. After doing all these we were very proud to see the new GTMetrix results:
Pretty remarkable considering no new hardware was introduced to the website.
Content Updates:
On top of performance, we also did an SEO deep dive using Google Analytics data. Doing this we were able to re-organize many pages of the site to better navigate users towards exactly what they were trying to find, but were having trouble locating before these changes. This included some new styled elements to pop certain things into view more easily, as well as moving modules around to prioritize important content and CTA’s. All of this work is certain to boost the sites SEO ranking, and provide Equitas with more