Relaunching pastfoot.it
Migrating PHPNuke to WordPress
After months of working on a conversion from PHPNuke to WordPress, pastfoot.it has finally been relaunched today.
This website is interesting for various reasons. It was running on a really old PHPNuke code since 2003, setting a record of 11 years with the same (old) software. The latest PHP version it was compatible with was PHP 5.3.*. However, the v5.3.* branch of PHP will reach its end of life support this summer. So it was absolutely necessary to relaunch the site before this deadline.
When comparing the old site with the new site, I noticed the following:
The site was previously loading in 0.033 seconds and taking 3 MB of data.
The new WordPress site was loading in 1.2 seconds and it currently takes 14.4 MB of data.
Since it is unacceptable according to Google PageSpeed for a site to take more than 0.2 seconds to load, we deployed our own custom caching solution. After the cache was deployed, the site loaded within 0.00973 seconds, that’s 123 times faster than the standard WordPress site or 3.3 times faster than the old PHPNuke site. We didn’t do any other Google PageSpeed optimizations, as the customer did not express any need for that. However, the result is still a nice and fast loading page.