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Case study

Rescuing a ministry archive from Joomla

Japanese Christian Fellowship Network · jcfn.org

Years of newsletters and reports trapped behind a paginated Joomla site, rebuilt as pages that load in under a second.

The problem

JCFN’s site ran on Joomla, and its real value — directors’ letters, annual reports and newsletters going back years — was buried behind category listings that showed ten items at a time and paginated through a form, so nothing past the first page was reachable by a link or a search engine. The home page pulled down close to eight megabytes and shifted around as it loaded.

What we did

We crawled the whole archive rather than the first page of it, rebuilt the site as static pages, and gave every newsletter and report a stable address. The content that mattered came to the front, and the layout stopped moving while it loaded.

Result

The rebuilt home page is a fraction of a megabyte and paints in well under a second, and its accessibility score is now perfect. It is not yet the live site — jcfn.org still serves the Joomla version, and the document archive needs to be hosted before cutover.

Before and after

Home page

The live Joomla jcfn.org home page in Japanese: a large photo carousel of printed workbooks fills the screen beneath a crowded navigation bar, with social media buttons overlapping the content.
Before — a carousel where the explanation should be
The rebuilt JCFN home page in Japanese: the organisation’s name and purpose in plain type, a summary of what it does, and lists of the latest directors’ letters and newsletters.
After — what JCFN does, and the archive up front

Directors’ letters archive

The live Joomla directors’ letters page: a table of ten letters with author and hit-count columns, above a drop-down limiting the page to ten items at a time.
Before — ten per page, the rest behind a form
The rebuilt directors’ letters page: a count of 139 letters, listed in full and grouped under year headings, each one a link.
After — all 139, grouped by year

Resource downloads

The live Joomla resources page: a download-manager panel listing two subcategories as folder icons, annotated only with counts of sub-subcategories and files, above a “Powered by jDownloads” credit.
Before — folders inside folders, counts not names
The rebuilt resources page: every resource listed by name as a direct link on one page.
After — every resource named and one click away

What changed for the people using it

AspectBeforeAfterChange
Reaching the archiveTen items per page, paginated by a formEvery item has its own stable addressAll of it reachable
Finding it in searchNothing past page one was crawlableEvery page is a real, linkable URLNow indexable
Layout while loadingContent moved under the readerNothing movesStable
Content extractionTrapped in a Joomla databasePlain files in version controlPortable

What changed, measured

MeasureBeforeAfterChange
Performance score5499+45 pts
Accessibility score72100+28 pts
First Contentful Paint2.6 s0.8 s−69%
Largest Contentful Paint9.2 s0.8 s−91%
Layout shift (CLS)0.2820.000−100%
Page weight7,903 KiB7 KiB−100%
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. 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.