Potomac Beads Case Study

The Business

Fuelox is a high-traffic e-commerce brand operating on WordPress/WooCommerce. With a diverse digital product catalog and frequent sales campaigns, Fuelox’s performance and uptime are directly linked to revenue and customer satisfaction. As search engines increasingly prioritize page speed in their ranking criteria, Fuelox recognized the urgency of comprehensive website speed optimization to maintain a competitive advantage and prevent revenue loss due to slow load times.

The Objective

• Website Speed Audit: Conduct a full performance audit of the WordPress/WooCommerce installation, identifying server, software, and plugin-related bottlenecks.
• Load Time Reduction: Achieve sub-2-second homepage load times across devices to enhance SEO performance and provide a seamless user experience during peak traffic.
• Infrastructure Optimization: Optimize caching (with WP Rocket and Kinsta Cache), CDN configuration, and plugin management to ensure consistent, scalable site performance.
• Secure and Maintainable: Recommend secure practices for developer access and plugin management for ongoing stability.
• Scalability: Enable the site to handle future growth and high-traffic events without bottlenecks.

The Strategy

The project began with a comprehensive audit of Fuelox’s WordPress/WooCommerce ecosystem. A methodical review of all 82 installed plugins was conducted, deactivating and removing unnecessary or redundant extensions and updating the rest for compatibility and security. Kinsta Cache and WP Rocket were tuned for optimal frontend performance, taking server-level cache restrictions into account.
Image optimization and style fixes were deployed throughout the homepage and the rest of the site, reducing homepage size by 26%. Every possible configuration for WP Rocket, Cloudflare CDN, and server-side compression was applied given the hosting environment’s constraints. Select admin plugins and logging functionalities were flagged for optional removal to further reduce database bloat and back-end overhead.
All enhancements were completed on the live site with zero downtime, ensuring the client maintained continuous business operations throughout the engagement.

Results

Fuelox.com saw significant, concrete improvements as a direct result of this project. Homepage load times were reduced from 12.6 seconds to under 5 seconds—a 60% improvement—directly impacting user experience and reducing the risk of cart abandonment during high-traffic periods. Homepage data size dropped from 90MB to 67MB, contributing to faster loads and more efficient use of CDN resources.
Google PageSpeed Insights scores modestly increased for both mobile and desktop, reflecting the technical limitations imposed by hosting environment and caching layers. All plugin and caching optimizations maximized the current infrastructure’s potential. Fuelox is now equipped to better withstand sudden increases in site visitors without performance degradation.
Further improvements, such as plugin minimization or a move to a dedicated server, were recommended for future growth—but within current resources, the site is stable, secure, and operating at peak efficiency.