IFS Coatings moved thousands of colours to a quicker, safer site

Main content now appears in 1.4 seconds in a mobile test, not 3.2, with no plugins to patch and every old address kept.

Fig. 1 The IFS Coatings home page as it runs now, with its hero video playing. Recorded 29 October 2026 at 1280 px, eight seconds. On a phone you see a recording taken at phone width on 3 November 2026.

Client: IFS Coatings
Sector: Powder coating manufacture
Live since: September 2026
Scope: WordPress migration, Website, The editor
Client approval: The client has seen and approved this study
Built with: Astro, Netlify, Decap CMS
The live site: ifscoatings.com

The situation

We built the IFS Coatings WordPress site. By November 2025 it ran 45 plugins and took 3.2 seconds to show its main content in a mobile test.

What we did

We rebuilt it as pages made in advance, keeping or permanently redirecting every old address.

We built it with Astro and Decap CMS, host it on Netlify, and brought no code across from the old server.

We moved the colour library into plain content files, which the IFS team edits in a simple editor.

Headline changes

Main content on screen, mobileBefore3.2 sAfter1.4 s
Core Web Vitals, real visitors, mobileBeforeFailedAfterPassed
Active pluginsBefore45After0

A PageSpeed Insights report for ifscoatings.com on mobile, run on 2 November 2026 at 17:34. Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO each score 100, and Agentic Browsing scores 2 of 2. — PageSpeed Insights, mobile, ifscoatings.com, run on 2 November 2026 at 17:34. A single lab run, cropped to the header and the five scores. The real-visitor section of the report, which sits between them, is left out.

How each figure was measured

Main content on screen, mobile. Old site measured in PageSpeed Insights, November 2025. New site measured 28 October 2026, PageSpeed Insights lab test (Lighthouse 13.6.0), mobile profile, median of three runs. November 2025 and 28 October 2026.
Core Web Vitals, real visitors, mobile. Google Chrome UX Report via PageSpeed Insights, home page, mobile, latest 28-day period. Real-visitor largest contentful paint 1.4 s and layout shift 0. November 2025 and 29 October 2026.
Active plugins. Count of active plugins on the old WordPress install; the new site has none November 2025.

In detail: every measure and its method

Other case studies

OpenThrottleE-commerce without WooCommerceWhat it covered: E-commerce, Website, Customer accounts
Photograph: © Jess Shurte Photography & Dunedin Consort.
Matthew BrookSmall-site migration, self-editing, and design rangeWhat it covered: WordPress migration, Website, The editor
British Film Database (our own project)Data engineering, automation, and a site that maintains itselfWhat it covered: Data engineering, Website, Automation

Last reviewed 29 October 2026.

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