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Case study · Performance

From a 28 to a perfect 100/100 PageSpeed.

A bloated commercial theme was dragging a client's site to a crawl. We threw it out, hand-built a custom theme on a component architecture, and cut the page weight by more than 95%. The result loads in under a second.

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Client
Confidential
Focus
Performance & UX
Services
Custom theme · Page builder
Platform
WordPress
0/100PageSpeed, mobile & desktopfrom 28 / 73
0.96sFully loaded timefrom 4.5s
0Total page requestsfrom 106

The challenge

The site had been built on a popular commercial ThemeForest theme. It looked fine, but under the hood it was carrying the weight of features the client never used: stacked plugins, bloated CSS and JavaScript, and dozens of unnecessary requests on every page load.

The cost showed up where it hurts. PageSpeed scores sat at 28 on mobile and 73 on desktop, the page took four and a half seconds to fully load, and both rankings and user experience suffered for it.

On mobile especially, that delay was quietly expensive. Visitors bounced before the page finished rendering, and search engines, which now treat speed as a ranking signal, were taking note.

The numbers

Before and after.

Same content and design intent, rebuilt on a foundation engineered for speed.

The Google PageSpeed report

BeforeGoogle PageSpeed Insights report before the rebuild, showing a poor mobile performance score
On the commercial theme
AfterGoogle PageSpeed Insights report after the rebuild, showing a perfect 100 score
On the custom build

Speed score (higher is better)

PageSpeed, mobile28100+72 pts
PageSpeed, desktop73100+27 pts

Page weight & requests (lower is better)

Fully loaded time4.5 s0.96 s−79%
Total requests10615−86%
HTML size158 KB10.3 KB−93%
CSS size73.7 KB1.66 KB−98%
JavaScript size579 KB1.68 KB−99%

Accessibility, SEO and Core Web Vitals all moved from "not optimal" to fully optimized in the same rebuild.

What we did

Rather than patch a theme that was never built for performance, we replaced it. A custom theme, hand-coded, gave us control over every byte the browser has to download.

We rebuilt the front end on a component-based architecture with critical CSS, so each page ships only the styles it actually needs. We eliminated plugins in favor of lean custom code, converted images to WEBP, and designed mobile-first from the start.

To keep the site easy to edit without reintroducing bloat, we paired it with a custom page builder, the same disciplined approach we bring to every build, so speed survives the first content update.

The payoff compounds. A site that loads in under a second ranks better, converts more, and stays fast because there is simply less to break, and far less for the next person to slow down.

Want a site that scores 100 and stays that way?

This is the exact approach we bring to every build. Tell us about your site and we'll show you what's possible.