Custom Site Speed Optimisation Significantly Boosts User Experience

About Fulton Hogan

Fulton Hogan has 90 years experience in the transport, water, energy, mining and land development infrastructure sector in New Zealand, Australia and the South Pacific. Fulton Hogan’s 7800+ strong team helps to create, connect, and care for communities; building the roads, ports, airports, infrastructure and property which bring people together.

The Challenge

Large infrastructure construction, roadworks and aggregate supplier company Fulton Hogan faced significant website performance issues, including slow loading times and frequent downtime, particularly during weekdays. This prompted the company to seek out Digital Animals for a comprehensive site speed optimisation project. The primary goal was to enhance the site’s performance and ensure a smooth, fast, and reliable user experience. The main challenges included:
  • Slow loading times – persistent slow loading speeds, especially noticeable from Monday to Friday.
  • Frequent downtime – periodic site outages that disrupted user experience and business operations.
  • High server load – an unusually high number of requests from specific client IP addresses, which could not be blocked or mitigated.
  • Technical bottlenecks – despite sufficient server hardware and caching, response times were high, pointing to software-related issues.
  • Caching conflicts – a conflict between a multi-lingual plugin and the caching plugin disabled the caching function, further degrading performance.

The Solution

We employed a comprehensive strategy to optimize Fulton Hogan’s website speed and performance:

 

Image Optimization

  • Resized and optimized images for key pages to improve First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
  • Converted existing image files to next-gen formats like WebP.

Resource Management

  • Minimized total page size to enhance FCP and LCP.
  • Deferred secondary JavaScript and styling resources to reduce render-blocking.
  • Implemented element sizing and minimized layout shifts to improve Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

We also tackled:

 

Loading Efficiency

  • Updated lazy-loading mechanisms to separate above-the-fold and below-the-fold content.
  • Reduced unused JavaScript and CSS styles.

Backend Optimization

  • Optimized the WordPress database and reduced auto-loaded data.
  • Reduced third-party asset usage.
  • Configured the hosting server for optimal performance.

Quality Control and Project Management

  • Conducted extensive site testing and quality control.
  • Managed project versions and ensured a smooth go-live process.

The Outcome

The site speed optimization project yielded significant improvements across various performance metrics:

Homepage

The client’s homepage improved by:

GT Metrix Speed Index
0 %
Pingdom Speed Index
0 %
Google PageSpeed Insights
0 %

BEFORE

GTmetrix report showing poor speed performance

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

Standard Page

The client’s standard pages improved by:

GT Metrix Speed Index
0 %
Pingdom Speed Index
0 %
Google PageSpeed Insights
0 %

These optimisations resulted in faster loading times, enhanced user experience, and reduced downtime, effectively meeting Fulton Hogan’s objectives. The improvements were felt across the entire site, ensuring that it could handle high-traffic loads efficiently. The technical issues were resolved, and the enhanced site speed positively impacted their business operations and user engagement.

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