Superior Bands: Checkout From 13 Seconds to One

Superior Bands makes conveyor bands, o-rings, and machine belts for industrial buyers, and sells them through a WooCommerce store. In May 2026 its chairman, Rick Robertson, put the problem plainly: the site was taking 14 seconds to display content, and that was the single biggest reason visitors were leaving without buying.

A site check-in graded the store a C. On mobile, product pages scored 33 out of 100 for performance. Accessibility scored in the low 60s, and not one of the 164 buttons, links, and form fields on the main shopping pages showed a keyboard user where they were.

I measured before changing anything. Every fix was scored against a baseline taken with Google PageSpeed Insights and the axe-core accessibility scanner, on the same five pages: home, shop, product, cart, and checkout.

The work ran in stages. The first month went after what shoppers felt most: payment and tracking scripts loading on pages that never used them, oversized images, and the accessibility basics. A later maintenance pass went looking for the cause of the slowness that remained, and found it inside the theme itself.

Stripe, captcha, and ad-tracking scripts now load only on the pages that need them, and 619 WebP versions replaced heavier images. Every interactive element got a visible focus indicator, pages got proper headings and landmarks, product image links got names a screen reader can announce, and pinch-to-zoom came back on phones.

The bigger find came in October. The theme carried 142 custom copies of WooCommerce’s own templates, and 130 of them had never actually been changed. They were eight-year-old copies standing in the way of every cart and checkout page. Removing them made those pages four to eight times faster.

The same pass cut the database from 719MB to 433MB, stopped a shipping plugin from writing 2MB of debug logs a day, upgraded PHP, and installed a firewall the store had gone without since early 2025. When an automated scanner hit the site that week, the server logs showed that nothing got through.

Cart and checkout pages that took five to thirteen seconds now load in about a second. On mobile, product pages went from a performance score of 33 to 59, with the stalls that made them hard to browse cut by 89 percent. Checkout’s accessibility score rose from 61 to 89, and keyboard users can now see where they are on every page.

The store is faster for every buyer, usable by more of them, and protected. The engagement began with a complimentary site check-in and continues as ongoing care.