A site that took 6.2 seconds to load. That's not a slow site. That's a site that's failing its job.
Visitors leave at 3 seconds. At 6 seconds, you've already lost half your traffic. The client was bleeding visitors before they even saw the content.
What We Found
The client had a WordPress build with Divi, three years of blog posts, and no idea why visitors bounced before the page loaded. The homepage had 47 HTTP requests. The main image was 8MB. The CSS was 2.3MB.
Every plugin added a few kilobytes of JavaScript. The Divi page builder injected another 400KB. By the time the page was interactive, the browser had downloaded nearly 5MB of data.
On a 4G connection, that's six seconds gone before the visitor can click anything.
The Migration Strategy
We migrated to a modern stack: Next.js, static export, Cloudflare. No databases to query. No plugin bloat. No theme overhead.
Static export means every page is pre-built at deploy time and served as plain HTML. No server round trips. No dynamic processing. The HTML hits Cloudflare's edge servers around the world and serves instantly.
We preserved all the blog posts, but we rebuilt the markup to be minimal. We inlined critical CSS. We removed every non-essential script. We optimized the hero image to 60KB.
The Results
The result: 1.4 seconds load time. A 4.8-second improvement. Not because we're smarter. Because we removed the things that slow pages down.
Lighthouse went from 52 to 97. That's the difference between "this site works sometimes" and "this site works."
Traffic increased 23% in the first month. Bounce rate dropped 31%. The only thing that changed was speed.
That's not an accident. Fast sites convert better. Slow sites lose visitors.