01PerformanceImportivity Website Speed Fix
The site was WordPress and Elementor and took around ten seconds to load. I rebuilt the front end and left the CMS where it was.
Old and new measured against each other with Playwright, median of three runs. Cold, the old site could take ten seconds. The request count went up because the new front end splits its code into smaller files.
The problem
importivity.com ran on WordPress with Elementor. Every page was built on request, and Elementor loaded its own CSS and JavaScript on top of that.
A cold visit took around ten seconds. Warm it was still over two seconds. Buyers see that page before they ever speak to us.
The team edits the site themselves, so I could not just take WordPress away.
What I built
I split the site in two. WordPress stays as the CMS, so the team keeps editing in the same admin. The public site is a separate Next.js front end that reads from it.
I made the pages build ahead of time instead of when someone asks for them, so the browser gets finished HTML.
I compressed every image, moved all 250 redirects from the old site, and put the whole thing on our own VPS behind nginx.
How it works
- WordPress runs headless. The team edits in the same admin as before.
- Next.js pulls the content and pre-renders every page.
- Images are compressed and served in modern formats.
- All 250 redirects from the old site were mapped over, so no URL lost its ranking.
- nginx serves the whole thing from our own VPS.
What changed
It loads in about a second.
I measured both sites against each other instead of guessing, because the old one was still running when the new one went up.
The new site ships less than half the bytes and does not wait on the database to draw a page. No URL lost its ranking in the move.
