WordPress Sites Designed to Exceed Expectations

screenshot of civil engineer website

A website rebuild and redesign for CivilAir Engineers.

CivilAir Engineers, PLLC is a certified Veteran Owned Business – providing civil engineering, construction management, and staff augmentation services to public agencies and prime consultants.  CAE also specializes in infrastructure planning, engineering design, and construction management for capital improvement, airports, ports, and transportation projects.

Scope of Work

  • Accessibility
  • Performance Optimization
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Security Hardening
  • Visual Layout & Design
  • WordPress Theme Development

Performance

To optimize performance, overall page size, at 824 Kb, is 61% below the median industry homepage size of ~2.1 Mb. By migrating from GoDaddy’s site builder to WordPress, server requests, which are the primary cause of slow page load, have been reduced 91%, from 138 to 12.

Before & After Performance Comparison

Performance Metric Old GoDaddy-Powered Website
New WordPress Website
Google Lighthouse: Accessibility 92/100 100/100
Google Lighthouse: Best Practices 75/100 96/100
Google Lighthouse: Mobile Speed 71/100 99/100
Google Lighthouse: Desktop Speed 73/100 97/100
Google Lighthouse: Search Engine Optimization 85/100 92/100
WebPageTest Speed Index 3.748 1.822
Total Homepage File Size 3.046 Mb (1.34 Mb Images + 1.2 Mb Scripts + 120 Kb CSS + + 419 Kb Fonts + 33 Kb HTML) 824 Kb (335 Kb Images + 19 Kb Scripts + 4 Kb CSS + + 473 Kb Fonts + 13 Kb HTML)
Total Web Server Requests 138 (32 Images + 47 Scripts + 34 CSS + 9 Fonts + 10 Other + 6 HTML) 12 (3 Images + 4 Scripts + 2 CSS + 2 Fonts + 1 HTML)
Estimated Mobile Homepage Load Time ~3.8 seconds ~1.8 seconds

WebPageTest Speed Index: median = ~3.591; top 10% = <1.388
In 2024, the average page size = ~2.4 Mb and median page size = ~2.1 Mb.
Database-driven websites, like WordPress, are more performance optimized when server requests are < 40 – 60.

Site Credits

WordPress Design + Development: Scott Marlow