Balance Media, London, UK.

Summary

Balance Media is an online home for curious, conscious, and connected Londoners. They offer compelling insights, practical everyday tools, positive news, and witty opinion pieces brought to you by leading journalists, experts, and thought leaders. As its online presence grows rapidly, its website needs more optimizations to support the growing number of visitors. We partnered with Balance Media to optimize their website for advertising and increase their page speed.

Challenge

To optimize their website, we needed to measure their current page speed and set measurable outcomes of the performed work. To calculate the page speed, we used GTMetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and to get more insights into their WordPress platform, we used the Query Monitor plugin. The results were not pretty. GTMetrix gave us a 69% score and a full load time of almost 12 seconds while Query Monitor alerted us of 3 Slow Queries, 13 PHP warnings, and 143 notices.

Solution

Armed with the above information, we planned to reduce the page speed to under two seconds. We started by fixing the PHP errors and notices as well as identifying and correcting the slow queries. Fixing those issues led to significant improvement, but we were not done yet. Taking a look at GTMetrix results, we started to tackle those issues by optimizing the images, removing unnecessary fonts, moving the javascript scripts from the header to the footer, and moving inline javascript into its own files. We also fixed any 404 requests.

Results

Balance Media’s website speed was raised by 1090%, taking them from a load time of 11.9 seconds to just 1 second. We continue to monitor and collaborate with their team to improve their website. Page speed optimization is never complete but an ongoing process.