Helped Family Style rebuild and optimize their website, improving performance, increasing ad revenue, and delivering a seamless experience for more than 70,000 readers.
Location
New York, United States
Niche
Media & Publishing Platform
Services
Websiite Rebuild,
Performance Optimization,
Nodejs Automation
THE PROBLEM
Family Style website was struggling with major performance and user experience issues that affected ad revenue
- Slow load times and poor performance scores
- Navigation inconsistencies and ad placements disrupted the reading experience.
- Difficult site management due to unorganized class structures and bloated code.
- Poor optimization led to increased bandwidth costs and loss in ad revenue.
- Slow load times and poor performance scores
Client Message indicating his pain point
THE CHALLENGE
During my initial audit, I discovered multiple underlying issues affecting performance, maintainability, and user experience:
- Disorganized class structure made content updates risk and inconsistent.
- 15+ unoptimized fonts increased load time and bandwidth usage.
- Heavy use of custom code across nearly all CMS and static page, including inefficient ad scripts.
- 3,500+ high-resolution images embedded directly inside CMS rich text fields, overwhelming Webflow’s built in optimization system.
- Client’s constraint: The site had to remain live throughout the rebuild, eliminating the option for downtime.
Performance scores before custom optimizations
MY APPROACH
During my initial audit, I discovered multiple underlying issues affecting performance, maintainability, and user experience:
- Rebuilt 50+ static and CMS pages with a structured Client-First class system, improving scalability, consistency, and long-term maintainability.
- Reduced dependency on custom code by implementing Webflow-native features wherever possible
- Optimized ad code integration to deliver faster load times and cleaner performance.
- Integrated Shopify for eCommerce functionality with optimized custom code.
However, since Webflow’s Rich Text fields don’t support external URLs, I restructured the CMS to use custom HTML image tags enabling high-quality, CDN-hosted images to load instantly across the site.
Solving the Image Bottleneck:
- The biggest challenge was the 3,500+ embedded images, manual optimization wasn’t scalable.
- After extensive research, I developed a custom Node.js automation script that:
- Downloaded and optimized all images.
- Uploaded them to BunnyCDN for faster global delivery, and Re-linked them automatically within the CMS.
- Since the client’s content team published new stories daily, I built a custom internal web app to simplify their workflow:
- Users could upload images and captions with a single click.
- The app automatically sent the images to BunnyCDN and generated the correct HTML snippet for Webflow.
- This replaced a complicated, multi-step process with an intuitive one-click upload empowering non-technical team members to publish stories efficiently.
THE RESULTS
The improvements were significant and measurable:
- Website performance score increased from 35% → 86%
- Bandwidth consumption reduced by 80% through custom CDN optimization.
- Monthly costs dropped after removing unnecessary Webflow add-ons
- The site now supports 70,000+ active subscribers with faster load times and stable performance.
- Monthly ad revenue increased by over 40%, driven by faster load speeds and improved ad visibility.
Performance scores after custom optimizations
This project challenged me to think beyond traditional Webflow design, combining automation, performance optimization, and human workflow design.
It reinforced one of my core beliefs that:
“A great Webflow site isn’t just visually beautiful; it’s conversion-driven, scalable, efficient, and built to serve the people who use it.”
