An accessible, performance-optimized site rebuild for Safer Homes, Suicide Aware – a public health campaign focused on “lethal means safety” to help reduce suicides and self-harm through safe firearm and medication storage practices.
The Safer Homes team distributes lockboxes for medications and firearms, educates participants in suicide risk, and encourages secure, proactive storage for both firearms and medications. The organization’s main outreach efforts include:
- SAFER (Suicide Awareness for Firearm owners & Education Resources) – in-person lockbox giveaways
- TeleSAFER – remote lockbox distribution
- Targeted Interventions – a cultural competency training for medical and mental health providers
- Firearms industry training & outreach to promote suicide awareness and increase temporary, out-of-home emergency firearms storage
- Quarterly, public, free firearms safety webinars with an emphasis on suicide prevention
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 582 Kb, is 80% below the median industry homepage size of ~2.4 Mb, and server requests have been reduced 74%, from 159 to 42. These improvements increased mobile page load speed index 6 fold, to an acceptable 3 seconds.
Accessibility
To conform with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level AA – site updates included keyboard-navigable navigation; skip-to-content links; form field labels; semantic HTML; mobile-friendly ‘click-to-call’ phone numbers; and high color contrast palette.
| Performance Metric | old website | New Website |
|---|---|---|
| Google Lighthouse: Accessibility | 70/100 | 89/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Best Practices | 58/100 | 92/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Mobile Speed | 45/100 | 86/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Desktop Speed | 53/100 | 100/100 |
| Google Lighthouse: Search Engine Optimization | 69/100 | 98/100 |
| WebPageTest Speed Index | 12.155 | 2.925 |
| Total Homepage File Size | 2.96 Mb ( 1.35 Mb Images + 809 Kb Scripts + 435 Kb CSS + + 351 Kb Fonts + 76 Kb HTML) | 582 kb (77 Kb Images + 175 Kb Scripts + 77 Kb CSS + 254 Kb Fonts + 13 Kb HTML) |
| Total Web Server Requests | 159 (43 Images + 67 Scripts + 37 CSS + 6 Fonts + 3 Other + 3 HTML) | 42 (7 Images + 16 Scripts + 14 CSS + 4 Fonts + 1 HTML) |
| Estimated Mobile Homepage Load Time | ~12 seconds | ~2.9 seconds |
In 2022, 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 Development: Scott Marlow
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