Full-Stack Performance Overhaul
Meridian Creative Agency
Client
Meridian Creative Agency — a 15-person design agency with a WordPress portfolio site.
Challenge
Running on budget shared hosting with a 1.8s TTFB and 12s total page load. The site had become their biggest lead generation tool, but analytics showed 62% bounce rate on mobile. Contact form submissions had dropped 35% quarter-over-quarter.
What We Did
- Migrated hosting from shared to managed VPS with dedicated resources
- Deployed global CDN with edge nodes in 6 regions
- Optimized 847 database queries down to 23 per page load
- Built automated image optimization pipeline (compression + responsive sizing)
- Implemented full-page caching with intelligent cache invalidation
- Configured DNS prefetching and preconnect hints for third-party resources
- Optimized web fonts: subset, swap display, and preload
Results
- TTFB: 1.8s → 180ms
- Page load: 12s → 2.1s
- Bounce rate: 62% → 37% (dropped 40%)
- Contact form submissions: 3x increase
- Database queries per page: 847 → 23
“We thought our hosting was ‘good enough.’ Turns out our 1.8-second TTFB was costing us 35% of our leads. The ROI on this engagement paid for itself in the first quarter.”
Priya Sharma, Director of Marketing, Meridian Creative
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