A website that had become too heavy

La Page Tournée is an independent bookshop based in Lyon. Its showcase website, launched in 2021, had accumulated five years of uncontrolled updates. The result: a homepage weighing 8.4 MB, poor loading times, and an estimated carbon footprint of 4.2 g of CO₂ per visit — twice the web average. With 4,000 monthly visitors, the impact had become significant, in every sense of the word.

Our mission: to make the website lighter without changing its design or existing features.

An audit first

At Devoko, we never touch the code before understanding the problem. The audit revealed 11 unused plugins, 78% unnecessary CSS, 340 uncompressed images, and Google Fonts loaded from external servers on every visit.

What we changed in the code

We worked directly on the existing code, without redesigning the website or changing its CMS. All images were converted to WebP and resized according to the site’s real breakpoints. The stylesheets were cleaned and minified. Unnecessary plugins were removed, and their features were rewritten in vanilla JavaScript. Fonts were hosted locally in WOFF2 format. A browser and server caching system was configured. Finally, the hosting was moved to a server powered by 100% renewable energy.

The results

In four weeks, the page weight went from 8.4 MB to 3 MB. The Lighthouse performance score increased from 41 to 89. The carbon footprint per visit dropped to 1.2 g of CO₂, a 70% reduction. For the bookshop, this means 14 kg of CO₂ saved every month, without any visible change for visitors.

Why this is often overlooked

A heavy website means overloaded servers, unnecessary data transfer, and users waiting longer. Optimizing an existing website is one of the most effective ways to reduce a company’s digital footprint. It also improves SEO: Google takes loading speed into account in its ranking.

At Devoko, we believe you do not always need to start from scratch to do better.

Want to know how much your website weighs? Contact Devoko for an initial diagnosis.