London estate agency gets 10x more speed
Our recent work with a top London estate agency makes a meaty case for why a true partnership is so valuable to our clients. They reached out because they were running into website issues, but they had no idea how bad the problems had actually gotten. Did you know some services can HIDE issues? That’s the case with Cloudflare’s “always-on” service… it was masking the timeouts on their website. When we had a deeper look, we saw slow or unavailable property searches, frequent timeouts and overall poor site performance. They also had lapsed official support and security updates. It was time for an overhaul and a fresh pair of hands – ours!
Migrating to New Developers
Moving everything to a new dev team is a careful process. We don’t want anything to break in the meantime while we get to terms with the code and systems as they are. We did an audit first. The website was a Laravel one made with version 8 from 2020. That means their bug fixes were more than two years out of date and so were their security updates. That’s not a good look for a prodigious London estate agency. As their platform was running on outdated, unsupported versions with known vulnerabilities, we suggested an immediate move to Laravel Shift for smooth, automated updates.
Code Reviews
Next, we looked at their code and helped them fix some shocking issues like limited indexes on the properties table, hard-coded directory paths in the code, several coding mistakes, incorrect use of Laravel Blade, hardcoded file paths in MongoDB, massive thumbnail queries and inefficient N+1 queries.
Speed Optimisations
In our case study, we detailed our fix process. First, “to better understand the impact of these issues, we set up unit tests to simulate how property searches were being handled on the website. Initially, the speed test showed that the search query was taking 8.39 seconds to execute—far too long for a smooth user experience. We started by adding indexes to the database, which resulted in a slight speed improvement.” Next, “once we addressed the database indexing issues and eliminated the redundant queries, the performance improved significantly. The search query, which previously took 8.39 seconds, now ran in just 0.77 seconds—over a 10x improvement!”
Even if you’re not a code nerd, you know what a 10x improvement can mean for any business. Talk to us today about your current website and how it’s performing. We’d love to help you make essential improvements.
