Today we’re excited to announce the brand new Barrel Roll website! We’re coming up on our two year anniversary and it was time for a facelift.
As you can imagine, the way our website looks and functions is critical for our business. How are we going to convince prospective members that we can help them if our own website looks like a neon GeoCities monstrosity or takes longer to load than a site stored on the Wayback Machine? When we started developing our new website, we set a goal: a one second homepage load time, without sacrificing design or features.
Website Performance
We take performance seriously at Barrel Roll. Without a website that loads quickly and works across all modern devices, your audience will seek greener pastures.
Loading a page in one second or less is not difficult if you’re just displaying a few small graphics and some text, but add in all of the ecommerce and membership functionality we rely on, along with high-resolution graphics and lots of custom scripting, and it becomes a challenge.
We started by covering the basics that have helped us achieve such great WordPress optimization results for our members. By making sure that images are optimized, the code is minified, and a strong caching solution is in place, we had a good start.
Next, we setup Cloudflare for global distribution and additional performance benefits. Then we manually removed elements of our theme that we didn’t need, including Google fonts we weren’t using, which we replaced with an optimized Adobe TypeKit. This gave us more control over what type and how many fonts we were loading on each page.
Concatenation of certain HTML and CSS files came next, along with other settings that optimize the load order of elements for peak delivery to end users. We set external data sources like Google Analytics, TypeKit, and Olark live chat to pre-fetch DNS, further improving page load times.
After dozens of tests and tweaks, we reached and even exceeded our goal – 972ms! According to Pingdom, that’s faster than 90% of the sites they’ve tested.
Just as we do with our members, we’ll be monitoring our site performance over time and making adjustments as needed.
Website Design
We took our time – probably too much time – playing with different designs. Early drafts were simple modifications of the previous version, but we decided to change things up completely. That meant a totally new homepage layout, refreshed typography, and revamped sub-page layouts.
Our usage analysis indicated that users were still making good use of the trusty main menu, so we largely kept that intact with the new design. We broke out FAQ section our into a separate page to lighten the load of the homepage a bit.
We have always used the very popular Divi theme, reviewed here, to power the Barrel Roll site. We love the page builder and the flexibility it gives us. The less time we spend editing our own site, the more time we have to do work for our members.
Over time, Divi has evolved and added features. This meant that our new design required less custom CSS than ever before. Elegant Themes has also improved performance, further contributing to our stellar load speeds.
New Feature: Free Website Reviews
Each time we begin a conversation with a new or prospective member, we run a series of external tests on their site to look for potential issues that we can help resolve. The analysis includes performance tests, a security scan, and error detection, among others. It seemed like a no-brainer to turn this into a free service to give folks an idea of how we work and what to expect. So far, we’ve had a great response and look forward to expanding this in the future.
Sign-Up For a Free Website Review!
