Series A SaaS marketing site stuck on a bloated theme, flat organic for 6 months. Three weeks of work, 9 months of compounding results.
A Series A SaaS had been sitting on a stalled WordPress marketing site for 18 months. Page load averaged 6.4 seconds, Core Web Vitals were all red, and organic traffic had been flat for two quarters despite the content team publishing weekly. Their marketing lead suspected the platform was the problem; their previous agency kept telling them it wasn't.
We audited the site in three days. Found: a bought multi-purpose theme shipping 420 KB of CSS and 380 KB of JS on every page, 14 plugins that didn't need to be there, no object caching, images uploaded at 3000×2000 px, no CDN, and a hosting plan with 2 PHP workers handling all traffic for a site doing 80k monthly pageviews.
Three weeks of work: replaced the theme with a hand-coded custom theme, 14 plugins down to 4, full image conversion to WebP, Cloudflare CDN, LiteSpeed + Redis object caching, and migration to better hosting with 8 PHP workers. Page load dropped 6.4s → 0.9s. All three Core Web Vitals green. Over the next 9 months organic traffic climbed 210% — the content team had been producing good work; the platform had been strangling it.