Proxy
WordPress to Astro · Measured

We Rebuilt Two WordPress Sites To Load Like Light

Same content, same brand. We pulled them off WordPress and Elementor and rebuilt them on Astro as lean, hand-clean code. Drag the slider on each one to compare the old site with its rebuild; the design carries over, the weight does not.

Method Lighthouse mobile, median of warm runs
Measured Homepage, September 2026
Sites madebyproxy.com · stoneridgedecking.com
Our Own Site

We Started With Ourselves, And We Were The Worst Offender

madebyproxy.com scored a 46 on mobile and took nearly 30 seconds to paint its largest element. The rebuild scores a perfect 100 and paints in 1.5. It is the same site.

100
Mobile performance, up from 46
1.5s
Largest paint, down from 29.8s
65%
Less HTML on the homepage

Drag to compare · left is the WordPress site, right is the Astro rebuild

StackAstro (static)
CMSProxy CMS
HostCloudflare Pages
JavaScriptIslands only
madebyproxy.com homepage Before: WordPress + Elementor After: Astro Change
Performance score (mobile) 46 100 +54 pts
Largest Contentful Paint 29.8s 1.5s 20x faster
First Contentful Paint 6.4s 1.0s ‑84%
Total Blocking Time 404ms 0ms Gone
Speed Index 12.6s 1.1s ‑91%
Homepage HTML weight 158 KB 55 KB ‑65%
DOM elements 692 221 ‑68%
<div> count 382 35 ‑91%
Page-builder cruft (class strings) 1,383 0 Gone
Script tags 26 3 ‑88%
Cumulative Layout Shift stayed at a perfect 0 on both, and blocking time dropped to zero. We did not trade stability for speed; we removed the weight that was causing the slowness in the first place.
A Client Site

Then A Client Site Buried Under Seven Thousand Builder Tags

Stone Ridge Decking was a WordPress, Elementor, and Pafe build. Its homepage carried 7,560 builder class strings and 702 nested divs to say what forty-four elements now say. The live site takes 15 seconds to paint on mobile. The rebuild does it in 1.0, and holds a perfect 100.

100
Mobile performance, up from 62
1.0s
Largest paint, down from 15.1s
~0
Builder cruft, down from 7,560

Drag to compare · left is the WordPress site, right is the Astro rebuild

StackAstro (static)
CMSProxy CMS
HostCloudflare Pages
FormsVanilla islands
stoneridgedecking.com homepage Before: WordPress + Elementor After: Astro Change
Performance score (mobile) 62 100 +38 pts
Largest Contentful Paint 15.1s 1.0s 15x faster
First Contentful Paint 3.7s 1.0s ‑73%
Total Blocking Time 110ms 0ms Gone
Speed Index 5.8s 1.0s ‑83%
Homepage HTML weight 376 KB 63 KB ‑83%
DOM elements 1,193 438 ‑63%
<div> count 702 106 ‑85%
Page-builder cruft (class strings) 7,560 ~0 Gone
Script tags 26 5 ‑81%

Every performance figure is the median of warm Lighthouse mobile runs on the live pages, September 2026. Weight, DOM, div, cruft, and script counts are read straight from the page source.

How

The Trick Is That There Is No Trick; We Stopped Shipping The Bloat

Page builders like Elementor wrap every heading and paragraph in layers of nested divs and helper classes, then ship a stack of scripts to make them behave. We keep the design and the copy and throw the scaffolding away.

Your Site Can Be This Light Too

If your site runs on WordPress and a page builder, there is almost certainly weight like this hiding in it. We can measure yours and show you the same before and after.