Case study · Website speed audit · Finance, Melbourne
VIP Finance Group's WordPress website was still slow after a move to a bigger server. Our audit found seven reasons why, and not one of them was the server. We fixed them layer by layer, without changing a thing about the design.
vipfinancegroup.com.au · 14 pages · 84 tests · 12 days
VIP Finance Group arranges car, marine, equipment and personal finance from South Yarra in Melbourne. Its WordPress website is where new enquiries begin, through the Quick Quote and loan application forms. On its hosting company's advice, the site had just moved to a new, more powerful server. It still felt slow.
How they found us: the director's AI assistant pointed him to Lovely Pixel. He called at 9:30 that night, and the audit report was with him the next morning.
Slow websites rarely have a single cause, so every speed project starts with a full audit. This one covered every page, both devices and the whole route from a visitor in Brisbane to the website.
Also checked: accessibility, best practices, SEO, redirects and security settings.
Not one of the seven could be fixed by a faster server.
That is why the new server hadn't helped, and why the fix had to work at every layer of the site.
A full crawl, 84 tests and a written report ranking every cause by impact.
The fixes built and tested on a private copy of the site, with every page compared screenshot by screenshot.
Applied to the live site one step at a time, each with its own undo. The website and email stayed up throughout.
The same 84 tests again, and a plain-English before-and-after report.
The audit found problems in four places, so the work covered all four. None of it changed how a page looks.
What stayed exactly the same
84 tests on 29 September and the same 84 on 9 October: the same pages, devices, location and version of Google Lighthouse.
A typical page, fully loadedPhone test, measured from Brisbane
94% less time
Until a page starts to arriveTime to first byte, from Brisbane
94% less time
Visitors from ads and email linksUntil their page starts to arrive
97% less time
Main content on a mid-range phoneLighthouse simulation, typical page
67% less time
How we measured. Google Lighthouse 13.5.0 with identical settings on both days: three runs per page per device, median reported, from Brisbane on the Optus network. Load times are as measured in the test browser on our office connection; network timings are the median of five fresh connections. These are lab tests, repeatable before and after a change. What each visitor sees varies with their device and connection.
For a finance broker, the quote form is the page that matters most. It was the slowest page on a phone, and it jumped around while it loaded.
Each stage ended with a plain-English report, so the client never had to take our word for anything.
With the speed work finished on 10 October, VIP Finance Group asked us to take on its SEO and to look after all four of the group's websites. The SEO is measured the same way as the speed work: against a baseline recorded before anything changes, with the trend reported every month.
Everything between a visitor and the finished page. We crawled the whole site to find its 14 unique pages, ran 84 Google Lighthouse tests (three on mobile and three on desktop for every page), timed the server from Brisbane with repeated fresh connections, traced the route each request took, and checked redirects, caching and security settings. Accessibility, best practices and SEO were scored as well. The result was a written report that ranked seven causes by impact.
Because the server was not what held the site back. The audit found seven causes: requests routed through a security firewall in Paris, a slider holding back each banner headline, dozens of files loading before a page could appear, forms that jumped while loading, heavy fonts and images, third-party scripts and short browser caching. A faster server changes none of those, which is why we measure before recommending anything.
No. The design, content, pages and addresses are exactly as they were, and pages weigh about the same 1.1 MB, so nothing was stripped out to win points. We compared full-page screenshots of all 14 pages, on phone and desktop, before and after.
Twelve days from the first call to the final report. Every fix was proved on a private copy of the site first, then applied to the live site one step at a time, with full backups and an undo for each step. The website and email stayed up throughout. See how our WordPress speed optimisation works.
The cause is often somewhere else. We measure where the time goes before recommending anything, prove the fix on a copy of your site, and show you the before and after.
Based in Ipswich, working with businesses in Brisbane, Melbourne and across Australia.
Measured before-and-after speed work for WordPress sites anywhere in Australia.
How the speed work runs →Whether a Sydney-hosted site is slower for visitors in Victoria, and what to fix before moving hosts.
Hosting location in the speed FAQ →Updates, backups, uptime monitoring and a monthly performance check, so a fast site stays fast.
View website maintenance →Core Web Vitals, crawling, structured data and the other foundations search engines rely on.
View technical SEO →Credible, fast websites for accountants, brokers and financial advisers.
Web design for accountants and finance →The six most common causes of a slow WordPress site, and the fixes that work.
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