Allen Kenoyer Glass Inc.

Allen Kenoyer Glass Inc. is an art glass studio in Los Angeles that relies on its website to attract students for classes and workshops, as well as to showcase its portfolio of work. They had a Wordpress site running on an outdated version of PHP on their server, their SSL certificate had expired, the site was failing speed audits on Core Web Vitals, and their contact form hadn't been working for a long time. They agreed to have 10xDev perform major website optimizations.

First Steps

The first thing that we targeted was the outdated PHP running running on a shared aplus.net server. We had to do a full major version update from v7 to v8. Using FileZilla and the aplus.net FTP server, 10xDev downloaded a full site backup before starting with any updates to prepare for any breaking changes. Next, we went through each plugin and performed updates and testing to ensure compatibility with new PHP version before the major update. We then determined an update would be safe, and performed the update.

Another common reason for slow Wordpress sites is plugin mismanagment. We identified a calendar plugin that was being loaded on every page, despite only appearing once on the site, and was responsible for hundreds of kilobytes of data getting fetched. We removed this plugin and implemented a Google Calendar solution.

Implementing Cache & Database Cleanup

Since the site was running on an old, shared server, we implemented a cache layer at the server level to reduce overall usage and speed up response times to the browser. Overloaded databases are also likely culprits for slow Wordpress sites. We audited the database and found that a table had stored megabytes of cached data over the years. This cached data was audited and removed. While we were on the server, we also added an SSL certificate to improve security.

Final Touches

After optimizing the site at the code and server level, 10xDev then worked on SEO and visual updates. 10xDev updated the title tags and meta descriptions with targeted keywords to increase click through rate. We also added a new favicon and targeted content throughout some of the pages. The final optimization was introducing an email plugin that utilized SMTP instead of the php_mail function that was failing on the server. This allowed the client to receive form submissions once again.

The Results

Performance increased by ~45% according to Google's PageSpeed Insights. The website was faster, more secure, and more usable than it had ever been. All changes were made in under a week, and the client was very satisfied with the results.