Tampa Forge
About 250–290 KB → 34 KB
Home-page HTML. The WordPress version was 255 KB in a July 2024 archive snapshot and 292 KB in December 2024; today’s page is 34.5 KB.
Case study
From Elementor WordPress to a Laravel PWA.
A photography business site that had outgrown WordPress, moved to one lean platform that is mobile first, installable, and cheaper to run.
The result
Smaller, simpler, cheaper to run
Our own portfolio site, donaldsextonphotography.com, moved from Elementor WordPress to a Laravel CMS delivered as a progressive web app (PWA) during the past year. Numbers marked measured come from the public pages themselves; numbers marked owner-reported come from the site’s owner.
34–48 scripts → 5
Script tags in the home-page HTML, same snapshots against today’s page.
About $100 a month saved
A recurring monthly cost the site no longer pays after moving off the WordPress setup, about $1,200 a year.
Domain authority 17 → 20
As measured by Diib. Page speed, load times and uncached page loads also improved after the move.
The situation
Why leave WordPress
WordPress can become bloated and slow when it is not tightly managed, and a page-builder theme makes that worse: the archived WordPress pages carried dozens of scripts and a heavy HTML document before a single photo loaded. It also is not mobile-first by default, which matters for a site people open on their phones.
The goal was one unified platform that cost less to run and was simpler to look after, not a rewrite for its own sake.
What we did
One platform, built mobile first
- Replaced the Elementor WordPress site with a Laravel CMS, so content, galleries and the site live in one application instead of a core plus plugins.
- Delivered it as a PWA, so the site is installable and built for phones first.
- Served it from a small Caddy server behind Cloudflare, with a Vite-built front end.
Honest notes
What this does and does not prove
This is our own site, so we could take our time and change scope as we learned. A client migration is scoped, priced and staged first, with redirects mapped so search rankings carry over. WordPress is still the right answer for many sites (here is how we decide); this move made sense because we wanted one unified platform, mobile first, that cost less to run.
The speed claims above are page weight and script count, which anyone can check. The cost saving, the authority score (measured with Diib) and the speed improvements are the owner’s own; we have not published before-and-after lab scores because the old site can no longer be tested live.
Then we keep it running
Every build can roll onto a monthly retainer, month to month, cancel anytime. Harbor Watch, $149/mo covers tested updates, daily backups, security, and speed and uptime monitoring. Full Watch, $349/mo adds every web inquiry answered in under a minute. One-time setup is $495 and $795. See what each plan includes.
Thinking about the same move?
Tell us what your site runs on today and what it costs you. We reply within one business day with honest next steps, and we will say so if staying put is the better call.
Request a free consultation Get a fixed quote