A booking site that buckled at the busy times
A service business whose WordPress booking site slowed to a crawl exactly when demand peaked — diagnosed and made fast and stable.
Anonymised, illustrative example — not a named client, and with no invented metrics.
The problem
Every time the business ran a promotion, the site crawled and bookings were abandoned. The owner had been told to “upgrade hosting”, but that hadn't fixed it and they didn't want to keep throwing money at the symptom.
The approach
I measured the site under real conditions and found the real culprits: unoptimised images, a heavy page builder loading on every request, and missing caching. I optimised the assets, introduced proper caching, trimmed what loaded where, and tuned the booking flow — testing each change on a staging copy first.
The outcome
The site stayed responsive through the next promotion without an emergency hosting upgrade. The owner could see the before-and-after page-load measurements, and understood which changes mattered and why.
A composite example of performance work. The point isn’t a magic number — it’s finding what’s actually slow instead of guessing, and fixing the cause so it holds up when it matters.