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. Open the old site and its rebuild side by side; the design carries over, the weight does not.

Method PageSpeed Insights mobile, median of 3 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 scores 60 on mobile and takes about ten 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 60
1.5s
Largest paint, down from 9.9s
82%
Less HTML on the homepage

Click either card to open the live site · left is WordPress, 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) 60 100 +40 pts
Largest Contentful Paint 9.9s 1.5s 6x faster
First Contentful Paint 4.1s 0.8s ‑80%
Total Blocking Time 192ms 0ms Gone
Speed Index 5.5s 1.0s ‑82%
Homepage HTML weight 158 KB 28 KB ‑82%
DOM elements 796 172 ‑78%
<div> count 382 26 ‑93%
Page-builder cruft (class strings) 1,199 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 7,270 builder class strings and 702 nested divs where the rebuild uses 106. On mobile the live site scores 78 and paints in 5.5 seconds; the rebuild scores 97 and paints in 2.4, on a fraction of the code.

97
Mobile performance, up from 78
2.4s
Largest paint, down from 5.5s
~0
Builder cruft, down from 7,270

Click either card to open the live site · left is WordPress, 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) 78 97 +19 pts
Largest Contentful Paint 5.5s 2.4s ‑56%
First Contentful Paint 1.9s 1.2s ‑37%
Total Blocking Time 0ms 0ms Even
Speed Index 2.9s 2.4s ‑17%
Homepage HTML weight 376 KB 68 KB ‑82%
DOM elements 1,473 443 ‑70%
<div> count 702 106 ‑85%
Page-builder cruft (class strings) 7,270 ~0 Gone
Script tags 26 5 ‑81%

Every performance figure is the median of three PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) mobile runs on the live pages, September 2026; a heavy WordPress page's numbers vary from run to run, so these are representative medians. 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.