Mortgage Brain Website
I worked with Mortgage Brain to improve performance in Core Web Vitals, accessibility, and SEO. Over time, I managed to bring about some solid gains, though the hosting setup and legacy codebase limited how far I could get things.
Focus
Improving Largest Contentful Paint and avoiding unnecessary paints caused by missing attributes like image sizes and transition properties.
More efficient delivery and caching of media, CSS, and JavaScript.
Adding in ARIA roles and WCAG-compliant markup where it was missing.
Reducing the impact of render-blocking JavaScript, especially from Google Tag Manager.
Fixing bugs in the theme and conflicts with plugins.
Creating campaign pages for the marketing team.
Updating and modernising page designs.
Routine maintenance and testing.
Result
Performance was held back by the hosting platform and some legacy code I wasn’t able to replace at the time. If I’d had the opportunity, I would have moved the site onto my own ARM-based hosting, which is faster than WPEngine, uses 60% less energy, and runs entirely on renewable power. That would have opened the door for more improvements in performance and accessibility, without trading off animations and other interactions against Core Web Vitals.