Stichting Studiezaal: WordPress plugins disentangled and loading accelerated

Sometimes, a website accumulates so much "digital baggage" over the years that its speed succumbs to it. That was exactly the challenge at Stichting Studiezaal. I responded to their call via the freelance platform Qommunity to get a slow WordPress website up and running again. After a good and honest conversation, things went quiet for a while, but early this year the liberating news arrived: they wanted to work with me to solve this puzzle. No fuss, just good technical work was needed here more than ever.

A cautious approach to a complex landscape

The website was quite complex: many plugins, various predecessors who had worked on the code, and slow responsiveness. Because I wasn't the first developer to tackle this site, I opted for an extremely cautious and structured approach. After all, you don't want an optimization to break something elsewhere.

My first step? Placing the entire site behind a secure login on my own server. In this isolated environment, I could test and optimize to my heart's content without jeopardizing the launch. The road to a 1-second load time

Step by step, I cleaned up and accelerated the foundation's website:

• Decomposing plugins: I critically reviewed all active plugins. Anything that did not belong to the core was removed.
• Major cleanup: Unnecessary plugins were completely removed, and the remaining essential tools received a much-needed update.
• Database optimization: Under the hood, I cleaned up the database so that requests are processed faster.
• Caching strategy: By setting up caching smartly, the server does not have to reinvent the wheel with every visit.

Results that count

After a successful acceptance test by the client, we scheduled a joint time to implement the changes on the production server. The result is impressive: at crucial points, the load time has been reduced from no less than 5 seconds to just 1 second.