Kelley Country Creamery – Site Performance Review
One of our most delicious customers, whose family farm has been in business for over 160 years, was recently featured on national news! Yes, you guessed it ––– our favorite ice cream place, Kelley Country Creamery, was featured on Good Morning America on ABC on October 7th 2021. This was the second time their award-winning ice cream has been featured on national TV.
When great honors like this happen, it increases national and even global awareness, which means more traffic to their website. That is where the Geeks & Creatives of wisnet come into the story. Part of our mission is to provide extreme customer care to all our clients, which, among many things, means fast-loading, reliable sites.
WordPress Website Hosting + “Clean” Code
https://kelleycountrycreamery.com/ is a WordPress site we host in an environment that can scale to handle just about any traffic that gets thrown at it. Even though the hosting environment is fast and scalable, that does not mean that we can use ‘sloppy’ code. Clean and efficient code are keys to making sites load fast and keeping visitors engaged.
In preparation for Kelley’s national spotlight, we double-checked code, made sure WordPress plugins were up to date and running efficiently, and ran some checks using our favorite tools to make sure the site was ready for primetime. Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides a score that reflects the way search engines look at the site (for both desktop and mobile viewers). The higher the score, the better. Here is what we were able to accomplish for Kelleys.
Pretty good, huh?
Fast page load results like this help with visitor retention as well as SEO, making the site both more ‘findable’ and usable. While you should certainly strive to improve your website’s loading times as much as possible, getting a 100/100 in Google PageSpeed Insights isn’t always possible (depending on the content you want and need on your website). The actual speed of your website is what really matters to your visitors. To put it into perspective, we’ve seen sites with average loading times of under 500 milliseconds (which is extremely fast!) that don’t have a 100/100 score on PageSpeed Insights.
Behind the Scenes Geekery
How did we do that? If you are asking, you probably want to know some of the geeky details…
(Feel free to skip this paragraph if you would like – maybe enjoy a dish of chocolate covered potato chip ice cream instead.)
For starters, I mentioned that we have an awesome WordPress hosting environment as our foundation.
From there, the code that our developers write is always minified and also optimizes 3rd party plugin code. We defer JS files, making them non-render blocking; we aggregate all JS files into fewer files; we aggregate all CSS files and inline CSS into a single file; and images – we make sure those are lazy-loaded and responsive (Srcset).
And the cherry on top?
We also have a strong CDN (content delivery network) and firewall to help protect against any attacks and abuse.
Check out Kelley’s highlight on GMA:
Great job, Kelley’s! We are proud to be your website partner!
We’d love to be your website design, application development, and hosting partner too! We work for ice cream! (Not really, but it does help keep our energy level up.) (: