When the Community College of Vermont came to us for a complete rebuild of ccv.edu, they had a long wish list, but one priority rose above everything else: speed. CCV serves students across the entire state of Vermont, many of them in rural areas with slower connections or browsing on their phones between work and class. For those students, every second of load time is a barrier between them and their next step. CCV understood that, and they made it our north star.
That focus shaped every decision in the rebuild. We built the new site on WordPress’s native block editor (Gutenberg), which kept the foundation lean from day one. No page-builder overhead, no layers of scripts and styles the site doesn’t need. From there, we went after the things that quietly slow down most college websites. We put full-page caching in front of the site so pages are served instantly. We optimized every image so nothing ships heavier than it has to. And we cut external calls to a minimum, trimming the embedded feeds and third-party widgets that force a visitor’s browser to wait on somebody else’s server before the page can settle. Every one of those calls is a tax on every page view, and most sites pay it without ever asking why.
The results speak for themselves. The new ccv.edu scores a 98 on Google’s Lighthouse performance audit, and not on a stripped-down homepage but on a real, content-rich interior page like Apply to CCV. First contentful paint in 0.8 seconds. The largest element on screen in 1.0 second. Zero milliseconds of blocking time, and a cumulative layout shift of 0.001, which is to say the page doesn’t jump around as it loads.
But the numbers are really a stand-in for something simpler: when a future student taps a link to explore programs or apply, the page is just there. No spinner, no waiting, no reason to bounce. “One College. Many Paths” is CCV’s promise, and now the website gets out of the way and lets students find theirs.
Ready to make your website this fast? Whether you’re planning a complete rebuild or your current site just isn’t keeping up, we’d love to help. Get in touch and let’s get your next web project started.
