Cutting a 10-Second Load to Almost Instant with a Static Rebuild

What we changed, and why

Evology Manufacturing is an additive and build-to-print manufacturing company. Their marketing site ran on WordPress, and on a phone it could take up to 10 seconds to show anything on your screen.

We rebuilt it as a custom static site in about a month. Now it loads almost the instant someone taps a link, and it runs on infrastructure that costs under a dollar a month.

Here is what we changed, and why.

BeforeAfter

The site needed a refresh, not a new platform

Evology's site had aged. The look was dated, and more of the people researching them were showing up on phones than on a computer. So we started where the traffic is. We redesigned the site mobile-first, then scaled the layout up to desktop. Our goal was a more modern look that would be easier to navigate and use.

That is the visual half of the project. The half that mattered more was underneath.

A marketing site does not need WordPress

Evology's site has one job: explain what they make, how they make it, and how to work with them. No logins, no special data in a database, and no accounts to manage.

Now Wordpress is great when you need to get something up quickly with limited coding experience. But there will come a point where the business needs a faster website to reach more leads. That's where Evology was at.

The issue with WordPress is that it builds each page on the server every time it gets a request. This means that the page is being assembled for each visitor, which is a redundant waste of time and resources. Wordpress sites also tend to carry a heavy theme and a lot of plugins. Every plugin adds its own code to every page load. That is how a homepage ends up with a page size of 38 MB. Now that may not sound like a lot, but larger amounts of data needing to be downloaded means more time to load the page. On mobile, the largest piece of content took between 7.5 and 10 seconds to appear. A lead staring at a blank screen that long is usually gone before it finishes.

If you are weighing that call for your own site, here is how we think through a custom build versus WordPress, Shopify, or a template.

What “static” actually means

The best way to think about a static site is that it is a prebuilt site without a server. When a phone or a laptop asks for a page, it is already built and ready to send. This leads to nearly instant load times for every page.

We rebuilt the site as a custom static build and served it from a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of storage servers around the world that are readily available. That means each page loads from whichever storage location is closest to the visitor.

Now for the technical readers probably thinking it, yes WordPress can cache its pages, and the old site did. A cache helps, but it is not a guarantee. We measured a respectable average Time to First Byte of around 300-400ms, and that average hid the risk: the moment a visitor or a search crawler hit a page that had dropped out of the cache, the wait increased substantially. Now you can definitely fix that with a more powerful server, but that costs more money. A static site removes this entirely. Every page is the fast version, every time, and Time to First Byte settled around 100 ms, roughly 75% quicker.

Fewer pieces to break

A server-driven site has more moving parts, and any one of them can take everything down with it.

A static site has far less to go wrong. The pages are files sitting on a CDN. We expect it to almost never go down, and if something ever does, there are fewer steps to troubleshoot, so it is faster to fix.

Faster to build on, too

Then there is the part that never shows up in a performance score: how fast the site is to change.

On WordPress, every update ran through the server, and simple changes could take minutes to apply. Minutes add up. Over a year of edits, you lose real time to a spinner.

With the custom build, updates are quick. Changes run through an automated process that checks the site, optimizes the images, and publishes it, with a staging version to review before anything goes live. The team can move at the speed of the work, not the speed of the server.

SEO you own entirely

A rebuild is the moment to fix the foundation, so we did.

We reorganized the pages so it is clear what Evology does and who they serve. Every link from the old site now points to the right page on the new one, so the search rankings they had already earned carried over instead of getting lost. We also cleaned up the behind-the-scenes signals search engines read, so Google can tell what each page is about.

Lighthouse is Google's free tool for grading a site on things like speed and search readiness, and it is a common industry benchmark. It checks each page against a list of SEO best practices. The old site passed 7 to 8 of the 9 checks. The new one passes all 9. Lighthouse also scores performance on a 0 to 100 scale, and on desktop the new site sits in the low to mid 90s.

Homepage

Additive & Traditional

Industries We Serve

Capability Detail

Decades of Experience

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Why it worked

We built a site that fit the needs of the business, not the ease of development.

Evology did not need a heavy platform working against them. They needed a marketing site that loads fast, shows up in search, and is easy to keep current.