How Barbara's Website Got Faster and Easier to Look After

Barbara Pritchard is a textile artist whose work is all about colour. Her website had been built on WordPress with WooCommerce, on traditional shared hosting. It looked lovely, but it came with the usual baggage: plugins that needed constant security updates, and pages that were slow to load on a phone.

She didn't want a new look. She wanted the site she had, without the hassle.

What we did

1. Rebuilt the site page for page, matching her original design so closely that visitors wouldn't notice the change.
2. Moved it to Cloudflare, a global network that serves the pages from close to wherever the visitor is.
3. Kept the whole site in GitHub, a secure online store for the files. Every change is saved, and any version can be brought back.
4. Shrank the images. Her home page went from about 3.6 MB to about 2.2 MB, with no visible difference, so it loads much faster on phones.
5. Moved her email forwarding so enquiries kept arriving throughout.

What changed for Barbara

• Much less to go wrong. There are no plugins to update and no database to be hacked, so the security updates that used to be a constant job mostly disappear.
• Faster pages, which visitors notice and Google rewards.
• Peace of mind. A full copy of the site lives in GitHub, separate from the hosting, so it can't be lost.

Is this right for your site?

This approach suits sites that change now and then rather than every hour, such as portfolios, small business sites, community groups and artists. It's less suited to big online shops with thousands of products, which still need a full shop platform.

A quick way to tell: if your site needs constant plugin updates but you only change its content a few times a year, a simpler setup may suit you better.

Curious whether your site could be faster and easier to look after? Book a free chat and we'll take a look.