Faster, Safer Websites for Relationships Australia SA
Increase in Page Load Speed
From a 7.23-second average to 1.75 seconds.
Websites Managed
Each documented, monitored and reported monthly.
Increase in Website Traffic
Over a year.
Relationships Australia SA is a not-for-profit that has provided family and relationship services across the state for more than 70 years. Its website is how people find counselling, family dispute resolution and family violence support. It runs in eleven languages and carries a quick exit button for anyone who is not safe to be seen looking.
However, that website had grown into eight websites and two custom applications, with no documentation and nobody accountable for them. Slow, unstable and hard to search, it was getting in the way of the one thing it existed to do. In June 2025, RASA brought WP Creative in.
See Our Solutions
By 2025, the estate had outgrown the way it was being managed. There was no documentation, no monitoring, and nobody who could say with confidence what RASA owned.
- An estate nobody could account for. Eight websites and two custom applications, each built differently, with no documentation and nothing watching whether they were up.
- A slow, unstable main site. Over seven seconds to load, with recurring outages, including one that took the site down for more than six hours.
- People could not find the right service. The service finder did not guide people to the support they needed, and searching for a service by name often returned nothing at all.
- Security below standard. For an organisation holding sensitive client records, the sites were more exposed than they should have been.
Phase 1: Taking the estate on
The first job was not about improvement. It was working out what RASA actually had, and getting all of it monitored.
- The full estate mapped: eight websites spanning counselling, training, multicultural services and gambling help, plus two custom applications
- All eight sites documented, with a staging environment for each so nothing untested reached a live site
- Legacy access removed and credentials rotated across every platform
- Uptime monitoring, daily security scanning and daily performance checks put in place, none of which existed before
- A proper backup programme established, taking the main site from two backups on record to more than 100 retained
Phase 2: A Care Plan across eight properties
Rather than treating the estate as one job, we added all eight sites to a Website Care Plan and reported on each one individually. Eight sites means eight different plugin stacks, eight sets of vulnerabilities and eight things that can break on their own.
- Daily security scanning across every site
- Continuous plugin, theme and WordPress core patching, carrying the main site across two major WordPress upgrades
- Rolling backups across the whole estate
- Database and revision clean-ups to keep the sites lean
- A monthly report per site, showing what changed and what it picked up
Phase 3: Making services findable
A site with this many services needs structure more than it needs content. RASA had the services. What it did not have was a reliable path to them.
- Site search rebuilt to return services on a partial name match
- Service finder restructured around how people actually look for help
- Services regrouped so related support sits together rather than scattered across the site
- New service pages built for some of the most sensitive support RASA provides
Phase 4: Launches, rebuilds and a brand migration
Alongside website maintenance, the estate kept growing and changing.
- A new sister site launched in July 2025
- Two more sites were rebuilt on consistent Elementor foundations and deployed from staging in early 2026
- The registered training organisation moved to a domain that matches its brand, ahead of its enrolment campaign for six qualifications, and now holds a PageSpeed score of 82
Phase 5: Security brought up to standard
RASA holds counselling, adoption and family violence records. The security posture across the estate did not reflect that.
We assessed each of the eight sites on its own rather than sampling the main domain, documented what we found, and gave RASA before-and-after evidence for every fix.
-
- All seven recommended security headers implemented, from none in place
- Cookies switched from insecure to secure
- Debug output disabled in production, clearing the one high-severity finding
- Login and user enumeration routes closed off
- File and directory permissions corrected across every site
The estate now runs to one consistent security standard, with a documented record of exactly what changed.
Phase 6: Diagnosing the host, then moving all eight sites
By early 2026, the pattern in our own monitoring was hard to argue with. Load times sat above five seconds month after month, no matter what we changed on the sites themselves, and the same server errors kept returning. The problem was not the websites. It was the server they were sitting on.
Without nine months of daily performance data in front of us, the obvious move would have been another round of optimisation on a platform that was never going to carry it.
In May 2026, we migrated all eight properties to WP Engine. Average load time on the main site fell from 7.23 seconds at baseline to 1.75 seconds in the month after the move.
| Period | Average load time | Daily checks |
| Aug-Sep 2025 (baseline) | 7.23 s | 31 |
| Dec 2025-Jan 2026 | 6.33 s | 32 |
| May-Jun 2026 (post-migration) | 1.75 s | 31 |
| Jun-Jul 2026 | 1.84 s | 30 |
Each figure is the average of all daily checks within that window, taken from the monthly reports issued to RASA at the time.
Stability moved with it. In January 2026, the main site spent more than 24 hours offline, across dozens of separate outages. By the end of June, after the migration, it had gone forty days without a single interruption.
There was no rebuild here. RASA handed over eight undocumented websites, and the work started by measuring them, reporting on each one every month, and then fixing what the data actually pointed at rather than what was easiest to bill for.
The main site now loads in under two seconds instead of over seven. The errors that used to take it offline have stopped. And someone searching rasa.org.au for a service now finds it, which for a community services organisation is the only result that really counts.