Page weight
3.3 MB281 KB
91% lighter on the homepage
Case study · WordPress to Mainfolk
Same bar. Same pages. 91% less website between your customer and the menu.
A family-owned bar & grill in small-town Illinois ran a decade-old WordPress site built with Elementor. We moved it to Mainfolk with the free migrator, mapped every old link, and measured both sites the same day with the same test. Here is what actually changed.
Largest contentful paint
16.0s2.8s
The page a phone actually sees
Lighthouse SEO
92100
Performance rose 71 to 95
Rankings lost
Zero
Every old URL redirected
A good business carrying a heavy website.
The pub itself was doing everything right: live music every week, a full menu, breakfast at 8am, regulars who bring their friends. The website was where the trouble lived.
It was WordPress with the Elementor page builder, the way most small-business sites end up after a decade: a theme, a builder, and a stack of plugins each adding its own scripts and styles. The homepage had grown to 3.3 MB across 64 requests, and on a phone the main image took 16 seconds to finish painting. The site had also been hacked once in its past life, and we later found leftover spam still hiding in a page.
None of that is unusual. It is what "just add another plugin" looks like after ten years, and it is exactly the kind of site the Mainfolk migrator was built for.
Imported, not rebuilt by hand.
The importer crawled the old site (23 pages, 9 posts, 82 images), kept the pub's real colors and logo, and rebuilt the content as fast, editable Mainfolk sections.
- The content came across automatically.Pages, blog posts, the menu structure, photos into the media library, and the brand palette sampled from the old site itself, so the new site still looks like their site.
- Ten years of sprawl became 13 focused pages.Duplicate and stub pages were consolidated, and every old address 301-redirects to its new home, including old menu sub-pages and every old blog post URL.
- The events calendar became a feature, not a chore.Live-music dates now live in a real calendar with month, week and day views, structured event data search engines can read, and a news post that writes itself from the upcoming schedule.
- Cutover was a DNS change, not a leap of faith.The new site ran on a Mainfolk address until it was right. The old site stayed untouched until the domain flipped, and stayed available as a rollback after.
Nothing to maintain anymore. No plugin updates, no security patches, no 3 a.m. "the site is down" email. That is Mainfolk's job now.
Same day, same test, both sites.
We kept the old WordPress site running on its original server after cutover, which let us do something rare: test the old and new site with the same tool, on the same day, from the same machine.
| Measured (mobile) | WordPress + Elementor | Mainfolk |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse performance | 71 | 95 |
| Largest contentful paint | 16.0 s | 2.8 s 5.7× faster |
| Time to interactive | 16.2 s | 2.8 s 5.8× faster |
| Speed index | 4.5 s | 3.0 s |
| Page weight | 3,260 KB | 281 KB 91% lighter |
| Requests to load the page | 64 | 10 |
| Server response (TTFB) | 820 ms | 360 ms |
| Lighthouse SEO | 92 | 100 |
| Lighthouse best practices | 92 | 100 |
| Lighthouse accessibility | 89 | 96 |
Method: Google Lighthouse 13, emulated mobile, both sites tested minutes apart on 2026-08-30, eight days after cutover. The old site was measured on the same production server it always ran on. The new site is served from Mainfolk's global edge network, which is also why the same page arrives from a server near the visitor instead of one data center.
Nothing lost, and a stronger foundation.
The scariest part of any replatform is the part you cannot see: what happens to ten years of Google history. So we treated the move like the rankings were the cargo.
Every ranking held through the move. The pub's local search terms sat at positions like #2 and #3 before the migration, and tracking through the rebuild and cutover shows them unchanged. That is what a complete redirect map buys: every old page, menu sub-page and blog post URL answers with a 301 to its new home, so Google transfers the history instead of restarting it.
The foundation got better, not just preserved. The Lighthouse SEO score went from 92 to a clean 100. The new site ships per-page titles and descriptions, structured data for a local restaurant and bar, structured event data for every show on the calendar, a proper sitemap, and analytics, which the old site never had at all. And because Google now uses page experience as a signal, a 16-second paint becoming a 2.8-second one is itself SEO work.
What we will not claim: ranking jumps eight days after cutover. Search movement takes months, and we would rather show you a measurement than a promise. The numbers above are the ones we can stand behind today.
Your WordPress site can make this move.
Install the free migrator plugin, click Export, and see your own site rebuilt on Mainfolk. Your WordPress site is never touched, so there is nothing to risk by looking.