Vesala’s Sales Manager came to me when she (and her colluages) became fed up with the company’s extremely slow and buggy website and the incompetence of the web company they were working with. Vesala’s website is a WordPress Woocommerce site selling about just a dozens of industrial products. The site’s design is plain, its structure simple and its ecommerce at just small-scale. However, the loading speed in both the front- and back-end had become unbearable to a point that it took 8-10 seconds to load the home page! So the client asked me to provide a web performance consulting – to examine the website, find out what were the problems and propose solutions.
My service & the result
After examination, I quickly found out there were 3 main reasons causing the extremely poor performance of Vesala’s site:
- The current hosting plan couldn’t meet the website’s requirements, leading to terrible server’s response time.
- Too many plugins were installed, some of them were completely redundant, not in use, or could be replaced with a lighter, less resource-hungry plugins
- No server-side technologies were enabled
I then proposed a number of solutions to address these 3 causes
- Introducing the brand-new Cloud hosting in replace of the shared hosting. I made thorough comparison and recommendation about the best hosting provider and the most suitable plan for Vesala case
- Investigating all the plugins (around 60 in total!), removing unnecessary ones or replacing with better ones. Taking note of plugin conflict that can lead to fatal error (website crash)
- Enabling the latest server-side and speed-enhanced technologies: SSL (Let’s Encrypt), CDN (Cloudflare), caching (Varnish), etc.
Losing trust in the web company, the client asked me to implement all the technical solutions I suggested. As a result, I was responsible for migrating website from the old server to the new cloud hosting infrastructure, doing the setup and configuration, checking and fixing all the issues after the migration (DNS management, email SMTP), cleaning up the plugins and implementing all the server-side technologies. Due to the highly technical issues involved, I was very careful when changing something, always making backups and doing testing before applying the new changes.
Final result: the website loads at least 2-3 times faster, both in the front-end and the back-end. The difference before and after my service was so obvious that the client was very satisfied.
Testimonials
“In the initial project Duc did for us, he was faced with a big challenge – trying to fix the problems of a website someone else built. We were thrilled with the results and consider his skills, communication and openness to solving problems valuable traits. In addition to being a very talented developer, Duc is extremely reliable and a great guy to work with. He has an amazing work ethic and a friendly personality. We are looking forward to continue working with Duc in the future, I highly recommend him to anyone.“
Anna Simojoki, Sales Manager at H. Vesala Oy.
