Arkansas FCCLA: before and after
The old Arkansas FCCLA website ran on a hosted ASP.NET system: no HTTPS, nothing compressed, big photos and every change had to be requested from the vendor. We rebuilt it from the ground up. Same content and the same menu the organizers know, but it's now about five times faster on a phone and they edit it themselves.
Home page, old site vs new
| Measurement | Old site | New site | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully loaded on a phone | Old site: | New site: | 5.5× faster |
| Main picture on screen (LCP) | Old site: | New site: | 6.9× faster |
| Page weight | Old site: | New site: | 6.5× less |
| Pictures downloaded | Old site: | New site: | 6.4× less |
| JavaScript | Old site: | New site: | 448× less |
| Page HTML sent | Old site: | New site: | 15.3× less |
| Files downloaded | Old site: | New site: | 20 fewer |
Measured October 16, 2026 on the home page with headless Chrome as a phone on slow 4G (1.6 Mbps, 150 ms latency), cache off, middle of three runs. The test ran from our server, where the new site is hosted, so the new site saves a little travel time; page weight and file counts are the same from anywhere.
Everything we changed
HTTPS and HTTP/2
The old site had no secure connection at all. The new one is HTTPS only, with HTTP/2 so a browser fetches every file over one connection.
Compression
The old pages were sent uncompressed: 72 KB of HTML for the home page. With Brotli compression the same page is 4.7 KB.
Photos, done properly
We recompressed the whole photo library from 13.0 MB to 4.6 MB without visible loss. The server makes WebP copies in five sizes on demand, so a phone gets a phone-sized picture. Browsing the entire site on a phone downloads about 1 MB of pictures.
Almost no JavaScript
The old home page loaded 448 KB of scripts. The new one needs 1 KB: menus, galleries and forms are plain HTML and CSS.
Long-term caching
Style sheets, fonts and scripts carry a version tag, so a returning visitor's browser keeps them for a year and only downloads what changed. The old site's own files came with no caching instructions at all, so browsers kept checking back.
No outside servers
The old home page pulled scripts from Google and Cloudflare, including a 2013 version of jQuery. Now fonts, scripts and even the event calendar come from our own server, so no third party can slow the page down or track visitors.
Answers in milliseconds
Pages are built in 5 to 8 milliseconds. Search uses a ready-made index, and the Google Calendar feed refreshes in the background so no visitor waits on Google.
Nothing broke
Every old address (page.aspx?ID=…, /Join, /region1 and the rest) forwards to the matching new page, so bookmarks, printed flyers and Google results keep working.
Editing they control
Click-to-edit pages, a photo library with size buttons, version history on every page, and sign-ins that limit each organizer to their own section.
Cleaned up while we were there
We fixed about 40 typos on 34 pages, filled empty sections, and added an email sign-up list with spam protection and automatic blocking of password guessers.
Is your website slow, hard to change, or stuck with a vendor? We can measure it the same way and tell you what would help.
Ask us to look at yours