Optimization: a website 90% faster

Superconhecimento is a value-added service (VAS) for internet providers, working as an education platform with more than 300 courses.

Problem:

With a catalog of 300 courses and more than 100,000 users, Superconhecimento saw its site get slower and slower, reaching an incredible 30 seconds to load. There were three problems: a poor WordPress configuration, too many plugins and, of course, a bloated database.

Solution:

We rebuilt the site from scratch and adopted measures that made the extra plugins unnecessary, since working on top of the existing material would have been even more work. We did it in remarkably little time. In the end, load time improved by almost 90%.

Technologies used:

• LearnDash
• Loops & Logic
• ACF
• WooCommerce
• Uncanny Groups
• Elementor

A new platform:

With the redesign, the whole Superconhecimento site was rebuilt, including new features to improve the user experience. From the administrator's point of view, the site became much easier to manage. The home page, much more attractive and optimized than the LearnDash default. The user dashboard, a completely new feature built from scratch. Students can follow their courses, certificates, activity calendar and a notifications panel.

A website 89% faster!

By reprogramming the site, we removed a lot of the weight that so many plugins were putting on the server. By combining our own code with smart use of existing plugins, we removed 30 plugins and wrote certain functions directly in code, which makes the site lighter. Another 6 plugins stay deactivated and are only used when needed. That took the site from a 30-second load to 3.5 seconds. Some baseline weight remains because of the number of users (100,000+), so we don't expect it to load in under 1 second, especially on an educational platform.