Sustained Web Performance for PRD Burleigh Heads
Increase in Mobile Page Speed
Faster browsing for buyers checking listings on their phones.
Increase in Desktop Page Speed
Speed that held steady through ongoing optimisation.
Increase in Best Practices Score
Cleaner code and stronger technical foundations
PRD Burleigh Heads is a real estate agency on the southern Gold Coast, part of the PRD national network, handling residential sales, rentals and commercial leasing. The website plays an important role in connecting buyers and renters with the agency’s available properties. Buyers and renters browse live property listings through the website, so reliable listing data is critical to the agency’s day-to-day operations.
Like many long-running WordPress websites, performance had declined over time and recurring issues with the property feed were affecting the reliability of live listings.
See Our Solutions
PRD Burleigh Heads relied on external technical support to diagnose website and property feed issues when they occurred.
- Slow loading, worst on mobile. Google PageSpeed Insights graded the live site 24 on mobile and 57 on desktop. Average load time during the baseline period was 7.55 seconds, with individual checks exceeding 10 seconds. Property buyers browsing listings on mobile were experiencing a particularly slow website experience.
- Recurring availability issues. The website experienced repeated periods of downtime caused by different technical issues, including connection and rendering failures. Without active monitoring, issues like these can remain unnoticed until they begin affecting users.
- The property listings feed was critical to website reliability. Property listings were published automatically to the website, so feed interruptions could prevent new or updated listings from appearing correctly. Feed interruptions affected both individual listing categories and the wider property feed, with some issues requiring coordination with the external platform provider.
- A complex plugin stack requiring ongoing maintenance. The site relied on a broad mix of plugins supporting property listings, imports, caching and other core functionality. Regular patching and vulnerability management were required to keep the WordPress environment stable and secure.
Phase 1: Taking the site on
The site already had reliability and security issues when we took over. Our first priority was stabilising the website, resolving immediate risks and establishing a safer development process.
- Moved the website onto an ongoing maintenance programme
- Resolved an early site availability issue
- Investigated and resolved an early security alert
- Diagnosed and resolved property listings that were not syncing correctly to the website
- Patched identified plugin vulnerabilities as part of ongoing security maintenance
- Reviewed the website for exposure to emerging third-party security risks and confirmed appropriate remediation where required
- Established staging and local development environments so changes could be tested before reaching the live website
Phase 2: Security Plan with continuous monitoring
We moved the site onto an ongoing security and maintenance plan, with continuous monitoring and regular reporting. This gave the team clearer visibility over issues before they could affect users.
- Uptime monitoring and alerting helped identify availability issues early, before they could significantly affect users.
- Regular security scanning covering malware, vulnerabilities and website trust signals
- A rolling backup programme provided reliable restore points as part of the site’s ongoing protection.
- Ongoing WordPress core, theme and plugin updates kept the site’s key functionality maintained and up to date.
- Regular performance monitoring tracked load time and PageSpeed over time.
- Database optimisation to reduce accumulated overhead and support consistent performance.
- Regular plain-English reporting kept the client informed without adding extra technical overhead for their team.
Phase 3: Incident response on the property feed
Because the property feed is critical to the website, feed issues were prioritised and investigated quickly. WP Creative diagnosed whether problems originated from the website or the external platform and coordinated directly with the relevant provider when needed.
- Commercial rental listings restored after a feed fault
- Recurring downtime diagnosed and resolved
- A full property feed outage diagnosed and restored
- Identified an external platform issue and coordinated with the provider on the agency’s behalf
- A plugin conflict caught on staging before it reached the live site
Phase 4: UI/UX improvements
Alongside website maintenance, WP Creative worked through the site’s front end, addressing usability and presentation issues across mobile, tablet and desktop in stages.
- Consistent on every device. Spacing and imagery corrected across desktop, tablet and mobile.
- Cleaner property browsing. Listing cards and pagination reworked on the pages buyers use most.
- Everything responds properly. Buttons, links and navigation were refined to provide clearer feedback and a more consistent user experience.
Phase 5: Performance rebuilt, then improved every year
We ran a dedicated performance optimisation sprint on a staging build before deploying the improvements to the live site. Average load time fell from 7.55 seconds to 2.91 seconds during the initial optimisation period.
What matters more is what happened next. Performance continued to improve over time, with the site becoming measurably faster across the engagement.
When performance regressed, ongoing monitoring helped us identify and correct the issue quickly. Load times were brought back down and remained stable across subsequent checks without requiring the client to intervene.
PRD Burleigh Heads did not need a full website rebuild to improve performance. Ongoing optimisation, maintenance and technical ownership delivered it instead.
Across the engagement the site became consistently faster and stayed that way. We diagnosed feed and performance issues as they surfaced and took them up with the external platform provider when the fault sat outside the website, so the agency’s team never carried the technical load.