A new WordPress site for Arcora Foundation’s Washington State Water Fluoridation campaign.
Scope of Work
This project involved upgrading a DIVI Child Theme running outdated, insecure PHP software to a modern, Full Site Editor Theme running PHP 8.4. Non-semantic DIVI code was replaced with accessible, semantic HTML structure.
- Accessibility Compliance
- Performance Optimization
- Security Hardening
- WordPress Theme Development
Accessibility improvements include:
- Scalable viewport for mobile and assistive technology devices
- Links with 2 visual indicators
- Skip-to-Content links for screen readers
- Secondary navigation method: site search
Homepage file size was reduced 50% to 1 Mb, less than half the industry median; and server requests were also reduced 50% from 64 to 32 – resulting in sub 3 second mobile load times.
Benchmarks
| Performance Metric | Old DIVI Website | New WordPress Website |
|---|---|---|
| Google Lighthouse: Accessibility | 83/100 | 96/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Best Practices | 92/100 | 92/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Mobile Speed | 57/100 | 94/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Desktop Speed | 88/100 | 96/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Search Engine Optimization | 92/100 | 92/100 |
| WebPageTest Speed Index | 4.130 | 2.684 |
| Total Homepage File Size | 2 Mb (612 Kb Images + 1.05 Mb Scripts + 154 Kb CSS + 306 Kb Fonts + 612 Kb HTML) | 1 Mb (325 Kb Images + 772 Kb Scripts + 99 Kb CSS + 35 Kb Fonts + 75 Kb HTML) |
| Total Web Server Requests | 64 (9 Images + 18 Scripts + 13 CSS + 7 Fonts + 11 Other + 6 HTML) | 32 (6 Images + 11 Scripts + 5 CSS + 1 Font + 4 Other + 5 HTML) |
| Estimated Mobile Homepage Load Time | ~4.3 seconds | < 1 second |
In 2025, 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
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