WorkVu.City
A public site that loads in under a second
Page load went from about 5 seconds, and worse than 10 on a bad page, to under a second. Hosting went from £100 a month to nothing.
- <1s
- Page load, from 5–15 seconds
- £0
- Hosting, from £100 a month
Vu.City sells licences from a public marketing site. It was a WordPress install with no source control, and people inside and outside the company complained that it was slow. We rebuilt it as a static React site on a headless CMS.
The problem
The site had to carry marketing and the path to buying a licence. The slowest pages took more than 10 seconds. A typical page was about 5.
WordPress was doing too much, and the team could not see the backend clearly enough to find the bottleneck. There was no source control and no automated release.
What we did
Content moved to a headless CMS the marketing team could still edit. The site itself became a React application, built static when content changed.
A build reaches production in a couple of minutes. The browser no longer waits on a backend to render a page. Source control and quality gates sit in front of every release.
What changed
Pages stay under a second, and content shows before the page has finished. Customers stopped noticing the wait.
The WordPress servers went away, and with them the cloud bill for that site. The team owns the deploy.