Website Conversion: LiveEdit to WordPress CMS

Pilates studio website

Kristi Galante owns and operates a pilates and yoga studio in Gig Harbor. Her old website was powered by the LiveEdit Platform – a CMS that offers integration with many third party services, including MindBodyOnline, a popular studio service.

Challenges

When we opened the studio in October 2014, we anticipated high client interaction with the website (registration for classes, payments, etc.). We found that potential clients are attracted to the studio by the design of the website, but prefer to do most of their scheduling and transactions in person. LiveEdit offered integration with MindBody, but client logins were often problematic, and we saw little need to continue paying for the API at LiveEdit when the MindBody consumer mode works well for the small number of clients who continue to schedule and pay online. Plus, MindBody has continue development of their mobile app, and more clients are booking through their mobile devices.

From the beginning the template-based design at LiveEdit was cumbersome. Design elements were not flexible, and it was not easy to simply go in and change calls-to-action or pictures. Mobile responsiveness was not satisfactory, and we grew increasingly frustrated with LiveEdit’s technical support. The service was no longer worth the monthly fee, and we decided to upgrade our hosting plan with A2 to handle both of our websites.

The old site suffered from some performance problems. Overall page size was 1.3 Mb, below the 2016 industry median page size of 1.9 Mb, but well above Google’s recommended benchmark of 500 Kb. Additionally, performance testing via Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and WebPageTest showed the site loading in the bottom 65% tier of sites.

Performance Benchmarks New WordPress Site Old LiveEdit Site
Google Mobile Speed:  69 50
Google Desktop Speed  88 57
Pingdom  88
faster than 82% of tested sites
76
slower than 64% of tested sites
WebPageTest Speed Index  1,416 6,076
YSlow  80 69
Web Page Size 387 Kb 1.3 Mb
Web Server Requests  25 48

Average web page size in 2017 = ~2.1 Mb
WebPageTest median Speed Index = 4,493; top 10% = < 1,388

Contributing to the performance lag were images not optimized for the web, slow server response, and the lack of header expirations.

Now we have a design that is portable, flexible, easy to update, and cost-efficient to maintain.