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.
madebyproxy.com scores 65 on mobile and takes about ten seconds to paint its largest element. The rebuild scores 99 and paints in about two seconds, on a fifth of the page weight. It is the same site.
Click either card to open the live site · left is WordPress, right is the Astro rebuild
| madebyproxy.com homepage | Before: WordPress + Elementor | After: Astro | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance score (mobile) | 65 | 99 | +34 pts |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 9.9s | 2.1s | ~5x faster |
| First Contentful Paint | 3.5s | 1.2s | ‑66% |
| Total Blocking Time | 123ms | 0ms | Gone |
| Speed Index | 4.7s | 1.2s | ‑74% |
| Total page weight | 5.7 MB | 1.0 MB | ‑82% |
| DOM elements | 684 | 215 | ‑69% |
| <div> count | 382 | 34 | ‑91% |
| Page-builder cruft (class strings) | 1,199 | 0 | Gone |
| Script tags | 25 | 5 | ‑80% |
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 73 and paints in 5.9 seconds; the rebuild scores 97 and paints in 2.4, on a fraction of the code.
Click either card to open the live site · left is WordPress, right is the Astro rebuild
| stoneridgedecking.com homepage | Before: WordPress + Elementor | After: Astro | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance score (mobile) | 73 | 97 | +24 pts |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 5.9s | 2.4s | ‑59% |
| First Contentful Paint | 2.6s | 1.2s | ‑54% |
| Total Blocking Time | 0ms | 0ms | Even |
| Speed Index | 4.4s | 2.4s | ‑45% |
| Homepage HTML weight | 376 KB | 73 KB | ‑81% |
| DOM elements | 1,188 | 439 | ‑63% |
| <div> count | 702 | 106 | ‑85% |
| Page-builder cruft (class strings) | 7,270 | 0 | Gone |
| Script tags | 27 | 5 | ‑81% |
Every performance figure is the median of seven to nine PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) mobile runs on the live pages, measured 25 September 2026. A heavy WordPress page's numbers vary from run to run, so these are representative medians, and the WordPress columns are a snapshot of sites that are still live and still changing. madebyproxy.com's Largest Contentful Paint has the widest spread of all: across nine runs it landed between 6.5s and 20.4s, and we publish the conservative end. DOM, div, cruft, and script counts are read from the served HTML source. Total page weight is PageSpeed's total byte weight on a cold mobile load, not a source count. Builder cruft counts the string "elementor" anywhere in the served HTML, case-insensitive.
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.
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.
