Website speed optimization case study by Darlene Kong, SEO & GEO Strategist and Website Manager, Emily Journey & Associates.
Nuwati Herbals relies on its WooCommerce website to help customers explore products and place orders. When slow page loads began affecting the browsing experience, owners Kassi and Ryan needed a practical way to improve performance without investing in a complete website rebuild.
Emily Journey & Associates focused this project on targeted changes to the existing website: caching configuration and homepage image optimization, building on a plugin cleanup we had completed earlier. The changes produced measurable gains in GTmetrix and, more importantly, a difference the client could feel.
The website performance challenge
The Nuwati Herbals website was loading slowly enough that both the owners and their customers noticed. Kassi and Ryan reported that visitors were leaving within the first 5 to 10 seconds because pages took too long to appear.
The problem was also documented in a customer order. The customer wrote, “I’m on an iPhone 17 and your site runs absolutely slow.” The slowdown was affecting real customers, not just technical reports.
Because Nuwati Herbals was not ready to invest in a rebuild, the immediate goal was to improve the existing website through focused changes. Before making them, we measured the website’s performance to establish a baseline.
Establishing the baseline
We tested the Nuwati Herbals homepage with GTmetrix before beginning the caching work. The website received a grade of E, with a performance score of 32% and a structure score of 76%.
The page’s main content took 6.5 seconds to appear. This measurement is known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP. Visitors also waited 5.6 seconds before the website began sending the page to their browser, measured as Time to First Byte, or TTFB.
The report recorded a Total Blocking Time, or TBT, of 584 milliseconds, showing additional delays while the browser processed the website’s code. The full page took 16.5 seconds to load. Together, these results gave us a baseline for evaluating the effect of the changes.
The measured performance improvements
Both tests were run in July 2026, 5 days apart, using GTmetrix’s default settings. After the caching and image work, we tested the same homepage again with GTmetrix.
Table of measurement metrics and results
| Metric | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix grade (overall performance rating) | E | B | 3 Grade Levels |
| Performance score (overall measure of page speed and responsiveness) | 32% | 84% | 52 points |
| Structure score (how closely the page follows recommended performance practices) | 76% | 81% | 5 points |
| Largest Contentful Paint (time for the page’s main content to appear) | 6.5 seconds | 1.5 seconds | 83% faster |
| Total Blocking Time (browser delay in processing website code) | 584 ms | 148 ms | 75% reduction |
| Time to First Byte (time for the website to begin responding) | 5.6 seconds | 275 ms | 95% faster |
| Fully loaded time (time for the entire page to finish loading) | 16.5 seconds | 8.9 seconds | 46% faster |
For a visitor, the most meaningful change was how quickly the page became usable. Main content that once took 6.5 seconds to appear now shows up in about a second, and the server begins responding almost immediately instead of after a long pause.
A better report only matters if people can feel the difference. After the changes were in place, Ryan confirmed that they could:
“I have noticed the difference and it is much appreciated!”
Ryan, Nuwati Herbals
What shaped the results and what comes next
The caching settings and homepage image optimization were important contributors, but they were not the only work affecting performance. Before the caching project, we had completed a plugin audit and cleanup for Nuwati Herbals. Removing unnecessary plugins and overlapping functions also helped the website load more efficiently.
GTmetrix results can vary from one test to another because website and server conditions are never identical. For that reason, the client’s firsthand experience provided useful confirmation that the gains were real outside the report.
Planned next steps include:
- Optimize images throughout the website to the smallest practical file size without sacrificing visible quality
- Evaluate the hosting environment to determine whether a different host could further improve page load times
This work is part of the ongoing technical care included in website management, which allows improvements like these to continue as the website and business grow.
