SoundEarth Strategies website header

WordPress Consulting for Private Companies and Nonprofit Organizations

Posted on

Environmental Services firm website screenshot

A website conversion from Joomla into WordPress for SoundEarth Strategies, a professional services firm that provides environmental and engineering consulting services in the Pacific Northwest. The marcom staff wanted to clone the existing Joomla website into a more intuitive, user-friendly WordPress CMS, already in use by a subsidiary.

Like WordPress, Joomla is a PHP-based open source Content Management System. With an estimated 2.5% share of market – it is estimated to be the fifth most popular CMS after WordPress (65% market share), Shopify (6.5%), Wix (3.4%) and Squarespace (3%). There are approximately 6,000 extensions available for Joomla vs. over 60,000 for WordPress.

Scope of Work

  • Accessibility Consulting
  • Database Content Migration
  • Performance Optimization
  • WordPress Theme Development

WebPageTest Speed Index shows a 62% improvement in mobile page load speed by reducing web server requests almost 20% and reducing page size from 3 Mb to 2 Mb.

Google Lighthouse accessibility benchmarks also improved markedly from 79 to 98/100. This is important for federal contractors who
must legally follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level AA under the American Disabilities Act. Improvements included accessible form fields, increased font sizes, and higher color contrast ratios.

Before & After Performance Comparison

Performance Metric Old Joomla Homepage
 New WordPress Homepage
Google Lighthouse: Accessibility 79/100 98/100
Google Lighthouse: Best Practices 92/100 92/100
Google Lighthouse: Mobile Speed 62/100 87/100
Google Lighthouse: Desktop Speed 89/100 87/100
Google Lighthouse: Search Engine Optimization 84/100 93/100
WebPageTest Speed Index 6.767 2.588
Total Homepage File Size 2.99 Mb (2.5 Mb Images + 295 Kb Scripts + 119 Kb CSS + 117 Kb Fonts + HTML) 1.98 Mb (1.05 Mb Images + 776 Kb Scripts + 86 Kb CSS + 39 Kb Fonts + 31 Kb Other + 34 Kb HTML)
Total Web Server Requests 50 (9 Images + 19 Scripts + 17 CSS + 4 Other + 1 HTML) 41 (7 Images + 12 Scripts + 8 CSS + 8 Other + 1 Font +5 HTML)
Estimated Mobile Homepage Load Time ~6.8 seconds ~2.6 seconds

WebPage Test Speed Index: median = ~3.591; top 10% = <1.388
In 2021, 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.

WordPress Theme Development: Scott Marlow