WordPress Training, Education, and Support

An accessible, performance-optimized site rebuild for Forefront Suicide Prevention, a program of the University of Washington School of Social Work.

Forefront website screenshot
Forefront Suicide Prevention offers training, education and program support for suicide prevention – using a public health approach to support community-based suicide prevention work.

Forefront needed to update its outdated WordPress site, which was running PHP version 7.4 (deprecated in November 2022). Unfortunately, the site had not been properly maintained for years, so Plugins and WordPress software could no longer be updated. As a result, significant bugs were impacting site features and visitor usability, as well as content editing.

Scope of Work

  • Accessibility consulting, training and remediation
  • Performance Optimization
  • Security Hardening
  • Visual Layout & Design
  • WordPress Theme Development
  • WordPress CMS training

Performance

The new homepage size, at 889 Kb, is 62% below the median industry size of ~2.4 Mb, and web server requests have been reduced 51%, from 80 to 39.

Accessibility

To conform with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level AA – site features include keyboard-navigable navigation; skip-to-content links; form field labels; semantic HTML; mobile-friendly ‘click-to-call’ phone numbers; and a high color contrast palette.

Performance Metric Old WordPress Website New WordPress Website
Google Lighthouse: Accessibility 80/100 100/100
Google Lighthouse: Best Practices 96/100 96/100
Google Lighthouse: Mobile Speed 67/100 81/100
Google Lighthouse: Desktop Speed 65/100 81/100
Google Lighthouse: Search Engine Optimization 92/100 85/100
WebPageTest Speed Index 3.442 2.960
Total Homepage File Size 3.246 Mb ( 1.6 Mb Images + 1.1 Mb Scripts + 130 Kb CSS + + 320 Kb Fonts + 129 Kb HTML) 889 Kb (357 Kb Images + 161 Kb Scripts + 106 Kb CSS + 270 Kb Fonts + 16 Kb HTML)
Total Web Server Requests 80 (23 Images + 37 Scripts + 9 CSS + 3 Fonts + 4 Other + 4 HTML) 39 (10 Images + 14 Scripts + 12 CSS + 4 Fonts + 1 HTML)
Estimated Mobile Homepage Load Time ~3.4 seconds ~2.9 seconds
WebPage Test 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

Visual Design: Joan van den Berg
WordPress Development: Scott Marlow

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