A cleanup and modernization of the Friends of Forman site following its move to the new host — a dramatically lighter database, faster pages, tracking brought under proper consent control, and a recurring subscription retired, with the site's look and content untouched.
* Page weight for a visitor who has not opted in to tracking — see “Cookies & tracking” below.
The site's database had grown to 222 MB — but the actual content (every page and post) accounts for under 5 MB of that. The rest was accumulated debris that slows every page load and every backup.
We removed 171,000 logged “page not found” errors, years of page-builder revision history and undo states (26 MB on their own), and stale security-scan caches. Every page, post, image and — importantly — all 16,475 stored form submissions were preserved and verified intact. Pages render byte-for-byte identically before and after.
The site carried a paid cookie-banner subscription. We replaced it with an in-house banner that matches the original exactly — and, more importantly, fixed what the banner was actually doing.
Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics were downloading and running the moment a page opened — before a visitor accepted or declined. That is both a privacy-compliance gap and dead weight on the page.
Advertising and analytics scripts are held back until a visitor agrees. We verified on the live page: zero tracking requests before consent, and everything fires normally once “Accept” is clicked. For a visitor who declines, this also cut the page weight from 5.1 MB to 2.8 MB — 45% lighter. The privacy fix and the speed fix turned out to be the same job.
The replacement banner is ours, works across all the sites, and carries no “powered by” badge — retiring a recurring per-site cost.
Several photographs had been uploaded at full camera resolution — one was 12.8 MB for a single image. These were resized and recompressed with no visible change in quality.
34 oversized photographs were optimized — the largest went from 12.8 MB to under 1 MB. Filenames and formats are unchanged, so nothing on the site breaks.
We generated WebP versions of ~1,500 images — a newer format that is far smaller than PNG or JPEG at the same quality. Visitors' browsers now receive the WebP version automatically, with the original served as a fallback to anything that can't display it. The effect is dramatic on the heavier graphics: one 16 MB image is delivered as 169 KB, another from 7.3 MB to 446 KB — 90–99% smaller — with no visible difference.
Every plugin was assessed. The goal was a leaner, more secure site — without disturbing anything the site actually relies on for forms, email or content.
The site still carried ManageWP “worker” — a plugin giving remote administrative access, tied to the previous developer's account. Left in place, it's a standing security exposure. It has been removed.
UpdraftPlus (the new host handles backups) and WP Rocket (caching is now handled at the network edge) were removed. Email delivery, form integrations, spam filtering and security were all left active and working.
While the site sits on its temporary address it should be hidden from Google, so it isn't indexed as a duplicate of the real site.
As migrated, the staging site was fully indexable and actively inviting search engines in — a duplicate-content risk to the real friendsofforman.org. We switched search indexing off.
Because indexing is now switched off, it must be switched back on when the site moves to its permanent address — otherwise the finished site won't appear in Google. This is on our list and flagged here so it can't be missed.