WordPress for Architectural Excellence
Project Overview
Architects Orange (AO) operates 17 studios across seven offices and 325+ staff and regularly appears on Building Design + Construction’s Top 200 Architecture Firms list . Their legacy WordPress theme ballooned to 5.2 s LCP on mobile, triggering Core‑Web‑Vitals warnings and limiting showcase opportunities for multimillion‑dollar multifamily projects .
Goals & KPIs
Goal | Target | 60‑day result |
|---|---|---|
Reduce Largest Contentful Paint | < 2.5 s (Google guideline) | 1.8 s |
Cut Time to First Byte (TTFB) | −50 % via caching | −54 % |
Improve mobile portfolio views | +15 % | +22 % (GA 4) |
Harden security posture | Zero critical vulnerabilities (Sucuri scan) | Achieved |
Our Approach
- Hosting migration to Auto‑scaling Cloud VPS — dropped average TTFB from 600 ms to 275 ms, aligning with WP Rocket’s caching benchmarks .
- Core upgrade to WordPress 6.5 — leveraged 2× faster editor loading and 60 % smaller pattern payloads.
- Asset optimization — minified and deferred JavaScript/CSS, slashing total JS by 42 %.
- Native lazy‑loading & WebP conversion — trimmed hero image weight 68 %, mirroring ShortPixel’s documented speed gains .
- Security hardening — least‑privilege perms, wp‑config.php move, and daily malware scans per Sucuri best practices .
- Core Web Vitals monitoring — real‑time alerts via Jetpack Boost; faster sites correlate with higher conversion rates .
Outcomes & Business Impact
- 1.8 s LCP, 0.05 CLS, 160 ms INP — all “good” thresholds .
- 22 % lift in portfolio pageviews as architects and developers now browse high‑res imagery friction‑free (internal analytics).
- 15 % longer average session duration, aligning with studies that faster WordPress sites improve engagement .
- Zero critical security incidents since launch thanks to hardening playbook .
“Modern Labyrinth rebuilt our WordPress stack so our design work loads as quickly as it inspires. The performance jump is tangible in client demos.” — Digital Marketing Manager, AO
