Load time went from 4.2 seconds
to under one.
A four-property boutique hotel group was losing direct bookings to OTAs. We rebuilt their WordPress site on a new foundation — same look, 4× faster, 47% more direct bookings in 60 days.
A beautiful site that had quietly fallen apart underneath.
The site was slow, and they knew it. Their designer had built something beautiful in 2019, but six years of plugins, third-party scripts, and a bloated page builder had turned it into a 4.2-second load on mobile. Google’s Core Web Vitals were all red.
They’d talked to three other agencies. Two wanted to rebuild on Webflow. One wanted to move them to a custom React front-end with a headless CMS. All three quotes crossed $80k.
The problem wasn’t that WordPress was wrong. The problem was what had been done to it — 41 active plugins, 7 different slider libraries, a page builder rendering 380KB of CSS on every page.
Our proposal: keep WordPress, throw out everything bolted onto it, rebuild the theme from scratch with the same visual design. Six weeks, one price.
Kept WordPress. Threw out everything bolted onto it.
Audit first, cut ruthlessly
Inventoried every plugin. Kept 9, removed 32. Replaced the page builder with clean block patterns. The database shrunk from 640MB to 180MB without losing a single page.
Custom theme, no dependencies
Hand-built theme — no Bootstrap, no Tailwind, no framework. 28KB of CSS, 12KB of JS total. All animations CSS-only. Image handling via native picture/srcset.
Booking engine on the critical path
Previous booking widget loaded 380KB of JS on every page. We moved it to on-demand: zero bytes until the user clicks "Book". First meaningful paint dropped 2.8s.
Edge caching + image pipeline
Cloudflare in front, full-page cache for anonymous visitors, bypass for logged-in staff. All images served as AVIF with WebP fallback, responsive sizing, lazy-loaded below the fold.
Migration without downtime
Built on a staging subdomain, ran both sites in parallel for 48 hours, cut over DNS on a Tuesday morning. Zero reservation losses. Zero broken URLs (we mapped all 240).
They didn’t just make it faster. They made it feel calm. The old site always felt like it was about to break. This one feels like it’ll still be here in ten years.
Measured 60 days after launch.
Same design. Four times faster.
Three more cases worth reading.
Want your site to land
on this page next year?
Every project we feature started with a $299 audit. It’s a no-pressure, numbers-first look at what’s slowing you down and what a measurable improvement would look like. Applied to any engagement you book afterward.
- Same process, same deliverable, every project
- Written findings + Loom walkthrough
- Applied to audit if you move forward