171% Increase in Organic Traffic By Improving Site Load Speed – Case Study

Ever wonder if speeding up your website loading speed can improve your SEO? Here’s an amazing case study of how it can almost triple your organic traffic by doing this. Not to mention improved conversion rates and higher revenue from a faster loading eCommerce website.

I’m going to share with you the exact steps of how I transformed the website from broken CSS and slow load time into a million dollar a year eCommerce store.

From this case study, you will learn how to:

• Stay away from slow loading plugins
• Consolidate and use less plugins
• Use better plugins and themes that are more optimized for WooCommerce
• How to secure your website
• Achieve all these with the best valued plugins and themes

The Challenge

Client had his staff that manage his website leave his company and he doesn’t have anyone to keep it properly updated. Plugins were conflicting with his theme and updating them causes error, CSS was broken and the site was going through brute force as well.

Site is slow as the PHP version, WordPress Core, plugins and themes weren’t updated. Not to mention the use of a page builder(Elementor) which wasn’t really needed for the style of his site, as well as multiple overlapping plugins and plugins that should instead be off-loaded to a SaaS solution. There was no CDN, images were not optimized properly and video was not loaded as a facade.

On top of that, the web hosting plan the client was on, had limited storage and inodes(which is terribly limited for an eCommerce store) and needed to be migrated to a different solution.

The site while loaded acceptably in terms of speed, was not optimized its best which is a huge factor in conversion rate.

Summary: Site was unmanaged and going through a boatload of problems.

Web Hosting

Client was actually using a very good webhost with the datacenter located in Hong Kong where his target market is and the plan he was on offered great limits on the CPU and RAM. The issue was the plan he was on was not suitable for his type of website.

Client runs a large brand of fitness products that spans hundreds of SKUs. Each product has multiple images, which WordPress by default then resize them into multiple sizes, which will then be optimized by me using ShortPixel into WebP and AVIF format, resulting in a huge number of files. Inodes are counted by how many files you have, regardless of file size and this was the immediate concern. But of course, due to his ever-growing catalog of products and him using his webhost for his email hosting, his 50GB hosting plan will reach its limits in a year or so.

However, the same webhost does not provide any upgrades of the current plan and he will need to move to an unmanaged VPS plan which creates a new scope in his website that he needs to manage.

Instead, I recommended and migrated him over to RackNerd’s Singapore datacenter with CPU and RAM upgrade. This plan also includes LiteSpeed hosting(which I will elaborate later on how it helps).

Staging

Before you embark on any changes in a website, always make sure to take a backup. The best tool for this job is WPVivid. WPVivid is great because you can control the different settings such as the backup speed to make sure the backing up process does not bug out. I always use the lowest and slowest settings. Another reason why WPVivid is awesome is because it has multiple direct integrations with other cloud storage solutions and the one in particular that I use is pCloud due to the one-time pricing they offer.

I followed through by creating a staging site off the backup file so that only when the site is fully ready, then the site will be imported and overwrite the live version.

Plan for a New Tech Stack

Firstly, I looked at all the plugins being installed and make a list of plugins that are redundant or have a better option.

Plugins like Yoast SEO are terrible and frequently have bugs that break your site or your SEO settings causing you huge organic traffic loss. WPRocket while great, is costly as you are recommended to take on their addon solutions like RocketCDN and Imagify. Instead, EWWW Image Optimizer can fill in this role as an all-in-one solution with a better CDN for Asian traffic.

Client was using YITH Questions and Answers as well as a review plugin. As great as YITH Q&A is, I decided to switch over to Customer Reviews for WooCommerce which recently released a Q&A feature on top of having a powerful review system. This allows me to use less plugin on a website for easier maintenance and troubleshooting should issues come up in the future while updating.

Client wasn’t able to update his plugins, themes and WordPress Core due to a conflict with WordFence Free which he has activated. Instead, I replaced it with Hide My WP Ghost Pro and only activated the necessary features such as brute force protection. As much as possible, you want to make sure to only activate features you require, to make sure additional scripts do not slow down your site.

There was also a terrible WhatsApp widget plugin that was causing a lot of issue on the site itself. This was then replaced by WATI’s free WhatsApp widget.

After the process of back and forth with my client, I was able to reduce the number of plugins from 40~ down to 30~.

Rebuild the site on Kadence Theme

In my opinion, Kadence is the best eCommerce theme. With the features in Kadence Theme, Blocks and Shop Kit, I will be able to recreate a similar design to the original site using Elementor.

Switching to Gutenberg blocks meant a faster loading speed while Kadence is also a lighter theme that is optimized for block editor than Astra(the previous theme the client was on). Not to mention the capabilities in Shop Kit that allows me to remove multiple overlapping plugins from the site.

This requires me to rebuild all their Elementor-built pages into Gutenberg. Thankfully the client did not have a lot of pages that require such work.

The Need for Speed

WPRocket is a good plugin. In truth though, it is a brilliantly marketed plugin. Whenever you look up WordPress caching or speeding up your website, you will possibly see the entirety of the first page of Google just recommending WPRocket.

While WPRocket works well, the issue with it is that it is not sufficient. It does not include a CDN or image optimizer which you will need to subscribe separately and adds up to a considerable sum as compared to EWWW Image Optimizer which includes everything and more at a much wallet-friendly price.

However, in this particular setup, somehow SWIS Performance plugin was conflicting with Kadence Shop Kit 2.0 possibly in this RackNerd server(I did not encounter the same issue with other webhost). Thankfully, as Racknerd hosting uses LiteSpeed servers, I was able to then use the LiteSpeed Cache which is equally as amazing as WPRocket and SWIS Performance, not to mention free.

Through this setup, I was able to shave off the load time from more than 2 seconds down to approximately 1.3s with a much faster First Contentful Paint.

Don’t Reload! AJAX It!

AJAX is throughly an amazing technology. AJAX or asynchronous Javascript and XML allows you to interact with the website without reloading a page. This means you do not need to load all the elements of the page again and it also gives a way better user experience.

You can use AJAX for product filters, search and more. I choose to implement it for the Add-to-Cart button, making it seamless to shop on the site.

Hide The Videos

Videos are a great conversion tool especially on your product pages. However, video players load additional JS and CSS that slow down the site. When coupled with multiple WooCommerce scripts also loading on the product page, this becomes hugely significant.

I implemented the Embed Plus Free plugin which allows the Youtube videos that the client has embedded on the product page to instead load them as a facade. Facade is basically loading the video thumbnail with a play button overlayed on top of it without loading the actual video player. The video player only loads when the user clicks on the thumbnail.

Secure Your Site

Hide My WP Ghost is a great solution for security without the cleaning features for malware, integrity scans etc. While some people might argue that security through obscurity is not really security, it does however, prevent countless of low threat level attacks which are mostly from bots.

You can even utilise Hide My WP Ghost with WordFence or Sucuri for additional layer of protection.

However, in most cases, I prefer to use Hide My WP Ghost to prevent attacks as the integrity and malware scans of other plugins can slow down your site.

Results

While co-relation does not necessary mean causality, the traffic increased tremendously after optimizing the website.

I infer that the increase in search engine rankings is attributed to 2 factors. Firstly, the more direct reason would be Core Web Vitals. Improvement in the overall CWVs helped to move up the search results. Secondly, would be the improved UX reduced bounce rates and improved the time on page, also resulting in better search rankings.

Most importantly, the client recorded a 27.41% increase in their revenue as compared to the previous year.

Overall, while I cannot claim that improving your site speed will definitely give you a similar result, it should always be one of the big priorities you should focus on when it comes to online marketing.