Castella Architectural Hardware sources sophisticated and beautiful ranges of fine architectural hardware from across the world. We have crafted a new, highly effective theme to decrease page load times and deliver an improved user experience.
Develop a high performing, WordPress theme based on the existing design. Their original website was delivering a poor user experience through a combination of slow page loads and outdated templates. Additionally there was mismatched styling from a number of plugins that added to an inconsistent user experience. The new theme needed to feel fast and responsive in order to please both website users and search engines.
The Goals
The Castella website had a visually beautiful theme showcasing to customers the collections of stylish architectural hardware (really nice handles!). Unfortunately the theme relied entirely on a WordPress page builder to create the visual layout. There were a few other issues at play (such as a huge number of 3rd party plugins etc) but the net effect was pages that were slow to load, and a poor user experience. Complications with the theme also meant we were unable to implement an efficient cache strategy. Page builder themes and plugins are often a quick and easy way for site owners to create and manage content, however they are almost guaranteed to perform poorly both in terms of speed and responsive design.
Impact of a Slow Website
The impacts of a slow website are many, but the key takeaways are;
To solve the slow website problem it was proposed that we would recreate the visual experience of the existing website in a completely new and custom built theme. The new theme was built with as many best practice principles in mind with the aim of reducing page load. At the same time we made a number of small improvements to create a more cohesive and unified design and simplify user interactions. The new theme was built from the “ground-up” to optimise the delivery of visible content, speed up overall page load, and ultimately provide a fast, snappy user experience.
To assess the performance of the new theme, a number of key performance metrics were used. The performance metrics included;
The metrics were measured across a number of pages/page types that represented a good cross-section of the whole website, but for the sake of brevity only the homepage results are included here. The numbers shown here are the mean averages.
Metric | Before | After | Improved |
---|---|---|---|
First Visual Change | 2.333s | 0.500s | 78.54% |
Speed Index | 3.018s | 1.599s | 47.02% |
Fully Loaded | 3.373s | 2.746s | 18.56% |
Number of Requests | 93 | 60 | 35.48% |
Google Page Speed (Mobile / Desktop) |
6 / 30 | 37 / 67 | – |