Bespoke WordPress Website

Let’s Go with the Children is one of the most comprehensive websites and databases of what to do and where to go with your children in the UK.

With over 35 years of experience in the family market, they are experts in activities for toddlers to 16-year olds.

Let’s Go With The Children (a.k.a Let’s Go With or; LGW) approached us with an existing WordPress website. Built using an off-the-shelf theme and combination of plugins cobbled together, it was loading painfully slowly. Sometimes taking 30 seconds to load a single page with some connections timing out altogether and not returning any results at all! This was with a test dataset of ~200-300 entries.

The challenge for this task was simple in its description; establish the cause of the slow performance and improve it. This may sound simple however upon carrying out some reverse engineering of the website’s makeup, it soon became apparent that it had been cobbled together beyond repair. The quality of the code used to build the off-the-shelf solutions was far from production ready and was likely one of the key factors in the poor performance.

Following this stark realisation, we promptly advised the client of this and that a complete rebuild of the website would be required.

We rebuilt the frontend of the website using the original theme as a reference point for the design & desired aesthetics. However, the majority of successes came from rebuilding and combining the logic provided by 3-4 plugins in the backend, into one. This coupled with high quality production ready code and a restructuring of the database, resulted in substantial performance improvements.