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Case study

A conference site that took 78 seconds to load

Equipper Conference · equipper.org

The main image on the Joomla site took over a minute to appear on a phone. The rebuild paints in under a second.

The problem

Equipper Conference ran across several Joomla installations. On a throttled mobile connection the largest element on the home page took seventy-eight seconds to appear, and the page moved under the reader’s finger while it loaded — a layout shift score of 0.85, where anything above 0.1 is considered poor. For a site whose job is to get people registered before a deadline, that is the whole funnel.

What we did

We consolidated the separate installations into one static site, rebuilt the registration path so it is reachable immediately, and stopped the page reflowing as it loads.

Result

First paint dropped from just over three seconds to under one, the largest element from seventy-eight seconds to three, and layout shift to zero. Page weight has barely moved, because the images inherited from the old site still need to go through an image pipeline — that work is outstanding and is the next thing to do.

Before and after

Home page

The live Joomla equipper.org home page in Japanese: a full-bleed photograph of conference attendees outdoors, with a dense navigation bar above it and floating social media buttons down the right edge.
Before — a photo, and no way in
The rebuilt Equipper Conference home page in Japanese: the conference name and a registration call to action over a photograph of attendees praying together, with a simple navigation bar.
After — the name, the status, and a way to register

What is EC?

The live Joomla “What is EC?” page: dense Japanese body text starting immediately under the navigation bar, with no page title.
Before — no heading, text edge to edge
The rebuilt “What is EC?” page: a large ECとは？ heading above the same Japanese text, set at a readable measure.
After — a title, and a readable line length

Scholarship applications

The live Joomla scholarship page: small grey Japanese text running the full width of the window, with no page heading and the application deadline buried mid-paragraph.
Before — no heading, and a deadline you could miss
The rebuilt scholarship page: a large 奨学金申請について heading, the eligibility criteria as a list, and the deadline on its own line.
After — the deadline where an applicant will see it

What changed for the people using it

AspectBeforeAfterChange
Number of installationsSeveral separate Joomla sitesOne siteConsolidated
Registering on a phoneBuried below a minute of loadingA Register button in the first screenfulReachable
Layout while loadingMoved under the reader’s fingerNothing movesStable
Image optimisationOriginals served as uploadedStill the originals — pipeline outstandingNot done yet

What changed, measured

MeasureBeforeAfterChange
Performance score4295+53 pts
Accessibility score8291+9 pts
First Contentful Paint3.2 s0.9 s−72%
Largest Contentful Paint78.2 s3.0 s−96%
Speed Index3.6 s0.9 s−75%
Layout shift (CLS)0.8460.000−100%
Page weight23,034 KiB21,801 KiB−5%
Date measured
5 August 2026
Methodology
Mobile Lighthouse with simulated throttling, home page. Performance figures are the median of 3 runs; accessibility and SEO are single runs, because those audits are deterministic.
Caveats
“Before” is the live Joomla site; “after” is the rebuild on its preview host. The page weight row is shown deliberately: at −5% it has barely moved, because the score improved through loading behaviour rather than through the inherited images getting smaller. No SEO score is shown: the rebuild is deliberately hidden from search engines until launch so it cannot compete with the live site, which Lighthouse scores as a failure.