Weigels.com
Intro
The following is a peer review of their website and not their business (which I love). I will be reviewing key “behind the scenes” things such as coding, caching, and other things that will conclude with an overview of the front end of the site that every day visitors experience.
Weigels.com is hosted with Flywheel using a variety of technologies to power it. Unfortunately it would appear that most of those technologies are either disabled or not being properly used. When I look at websites, including my own, I use a variety of tools to gather information. The first is the Firefox Inspect tool, second is the Netcraft Site Report, third is REDbot, fourth I do catch-all scan using VirusTotal, and I finish off with a handful of other tools as needed. Using these tools, I am able to learn a lot about a website. This peer review represents that data and is for informational purposes only.
Build Attributes
About this site
You’ll notice the Build Attributes on the right or below the intro, depending on what device you’re using. Regardless, the Build Attributes reflect the areas I’m concentrating on. If the site has part of the attribute I will mark it as a yes. If it has none, no. And, if I was unable to determine, as unknown (?).
Content Management
The site is built using WordPress, a content management system (CMS). WordPress is quite a robust and capable CMS as evidenced by it’s extensive usage on the newly redesigned NASA website.
Utility Framework
Unfortunately they are not using a Utility Framework (a WordPress theme is not a Framework), however their theme is using some partial variables for color. This is evident in the coding by a lack of CSS attributes typically found in a framework such as sizing units (EM, REM, Clamp, etc). Their site is still using PX which is a fixed unit vs EM or REM which is variable and changes according to the screen size and so on.
HTML Structure
Their site doesn’t follow the standard semantic HTML structure. When you view the code, you should see a Body tag (which is does have) on the top level. From there, when you expand that branch you should immediately see a Header, Main, and Footer tag…. you don’t. Those three main tags should be on the second level of the HTML as Body -> Header, Main, Footer. Instead they are:
Body -> Div -> Div -> Header
Body -> Div -> Div -> Main
Body -> Div -> Div -> Div -> Footer
From there the individual elements of those sections are buried in a ton of Div’s which increase the overall DOM and subsequently the page loading times. In short, even basic HTML structuring is poor and only continues to get worse. Why? It’s using the Avada theme with it’s built in Fusion website builder. Unfortunately where they provide ease of usage via their visual builder, it suffers significantly in code output and causes several other issues as a result.
Next Gen Image Optimization
There is no image optimization aside from dimension resizing before they were uploaded, but all the images appear as JPEG, or PNG. None are converted to WebP or AVIF, and none have any optimizing such as Lossy, Lossless, etc done to them. It’s apparent when you load the pages for the first time, but luckily they are using some sort of caching.
Content Caching
As I mentioned above, there is some caching on the site. To test this, open a private browser and visit their site. First page interaction is delayed (9-15 seconds) before full page load. Each subsequent visit to the same page is significantly faster (2-5 seconds), and the inspector shows the content loaded by cache as well. This caching is being handled by Flywheel, but apparently it’s been set for very basic caching which is better than nothing. Unfortunately options available with most caching such CSS & JS minimizing and combining, Deferring and Delaying JS, Prefetching, and more don’t appear to be enabled (assuming FlyCache offers those options). Those features if available, would significantly improve the site loading.
CDN
The site itself is not using a content delivery network, however the slider has several scripts associated that’s being delivered by a Cloudflare CDN. Also the fact that their hosting is Flywheel which offers a CDN with every single package is troubling, because that means it was intentionally left off or turned off inside the site options of the server control panel.
Search Engine Optimization
The site SEO is very minimal. It looks like it’s pulling the default WordPress page titles possibly through the theme and then outputting it. However every page is missing other key information such as descriptions, and more. The Facebook Open Graph is present, but this however is not a substitute for basic SEO that every site should have. WordPress automatically creates a Sitemap for your site, so luckily they at least have a sitemap for their site.
However there is some significant improvements that could be done that would only help their site SEO even more.
Overall Design
The overall look and feel with the animations is good. It seems to flow pretty well. The color palette for their brand is also displayed throughout the site with the red accents, and works well. I found a few issues while navigating through the site such as the footer menu. Who We Are, goes to a blank page with just the header and footer, and should instead be going to the Weigels Story page. Also on the top menu, the bottom red accent gives the appearance that every top level link also has a sub-level menu… which not all of them do. The Order Now link also takes you away from their site instead of opening a new tab to the Vroom Delivery site.
Perhaps some of this is just nuanced issues, but I think they could be easily tweaked/corrected.
Conclusion
I think the overall front end design looks good, but behind the scene things that affect the front end experience for visitors, is seriously suffering. Most of the things I pointed out can be easily and quickly implemented that would have minimal cost associated with it. The only point that would require significant work implementing at this point would be the Framework as it would require a lot of work to remove some of the existing CSS styling. The site isn’t using dynamic content aside from Instagram, so from a site level it does not appear to be there.
Their site is running on a decent shared hosting server, the SSL is good, and it came back as clean for virus/malware scans according to Virus Total (see link in intro).
However to be direct, there’s zero excuse for why Weigels does not have most, if not all, of these things already present on their site. They have the financial capability to support these features and more. So my question is, why do they not have them?