Enable Access are a leading manufacturer of disabled access ramps from threshold to modular ramp systems
Their existing website is built on WordPress using the Avada theme, the biggest selling on ThemeForest. The site promotes a range of products alongside the other more generic pages for a company website.
Enable Access had lost faith in their current web developer due to site issues ranging from slow front and back-end load speeds, ineffective methods of updating content and slow response from their current developer.
On inspection of the site and the plugins deployed it was clear what the original developers wanted to achieve, but they couldn’t do this due to their use of Avada. In addition there was a large amount of unnecessary plugins – active and inactive – performing unnecessary functions.
The developers were probably aiming to introduce a Custom Post Type into the website, probably products, which would then allow them to display products in an effective manner. However out of the box, Avada isn’t setup to allow for Custom Post Types – it’s possible but requires a bit more work and is something they probably didn’t factor into their original quote for the job, assuming the process would be easy and straight-forward.
My suggestions were to:
- Decrease plugin bloat
- Update plugins/theme
- Change hosting & install an SSL certificate
- Use a custom theme*
After implementing these changes page load time went from an inconsistent 2.5 seconds to a hideous 9 seconds to an overall consistent page load of 1.5 seconds.
*Due to budgetary restraints changing the site to use a new custom theme wasn’t feasible so Avada is still in use on the site. My recommendation still stands that they should as soon as the budget allows, get a custom theme built.
