WordPress Development & Support Astute Electronics

The Requirement

Astute Electronics are a UK based distributor of electronic components. They operate on a global scale and offer a number of expert services to accompany their extensive range of products from all the major component manufacturers.

We were introduced as WordPress Support experts to help manage and maintain their company website on a monthly basis, as well as assist with development works for new features. At the outset the website was hosted on WPEngine, so our involvment also required us to manage the platform for them.

The Approach

When we take over a website created by another developer, it's essential to establish how the site was built and whether any issues exist. We began by conducting a website audit to understand functionality. The site was in need of a lot of updates to WordPress and its plugins.

Once secured, a list of issues were prioritised and a plan for fixing them agreed. Then regular support continues thereafter.

The Work

A full backup of the site was taken and installed on our DEV environment. Security update patching was not up to date, so fixing that always comes first.

Next, a full audit revealed some issues that we were quickly able to address. One of them, a common issue we see in lots of WordPress sites, is where an overly high number of plugins are installed. A culture of plugging-in new features has led to websites weighed down with too much code. Google wants fast, efficient websites, not bloated, slow ones.

We therefore audit each plugin to understand it's features and the extent they are being used. Any surplus to requirements are removed. The plugin count for the site was high but we managed to remove around 10 plugns making it around 20% more efficient.

We then fixed a few broken functionality issues that had been reported to us, leaving a stable and fully functional site. We recently oversaw a hosting upgrade to further optimise the speed of the website.

The Results

A staged onboarding process enabled us to quickly stabilise the website, understand its issues and quickly apply fixes while also optimising its performance. A support program to ensure security updates are implememted each month, ensures everything is rock solid.