Starting as their own business, Luna Balloon Club’s website was made by the owners to see how far their project could go. As the business expanded and became a success, they needed their website to represent them as best as possible, but sadly their website optimisation was letting them down.
After a quick audit I was able to highlight many key issues from hosting to page caching and PHP version that could all be fixed. Moving any Australian business website away from GoDaddy hosting is always a pleasure, there are much better hosting options out there with much faster server response times.
With the site moved, I performed image optimisation, put on caching plugins, and configured them for maximum performance. The site before had not page caching which made a huge difference once enabled. PHP was upgraded and tweaked, enabling OPcache will significantly speed up the site in the long term. All optimisations performed will keep the site as fast as possible with no degradation over time.
With all E-commerce stores there is a lot of product images that benefit from a CDN, enabled a CDN means the product pages will load significantly faster for real world users. The site also had no security on it, enabling a Web Application Firewall will slow down the site, but this trade of is now able to be made as the site is so much faster.
The website was scoring C scores on GTmetrix with a 7.2 second load time, after optimisations, the site was A in Page Speed and A in YSlow with a 1.2 second load time – a 600% increase in speed.
Project Highlights:
- 600% speed increased for no additional on-going costs
- Seamless 0 downtime server hosting migration
- Implementing forced https:// without using plugins
- Ecwid E-commerce