Overview

Loll Designs, Inc. is a designer/manufacturer of durable, all-weather, outdoor furniture and accessories made with recycled plastic – mostly from single-use milk jugs. Using thoughtful, original designs and unique materials, Loll creates innovative, fun and high-quality products proudly crafted in the USA.

Long Load Times Mean Lower Conversions

The old ecommerce theme that Loll was working with failed to give them the flexibility and performance required to efficiently operate their store. Loll needed a website without the added bloat of a theme, which greatly affected page load time, user experience, and ultimately, online sales.

Removed Visual Composer page builder

From a development perspective, Visual Composer is a cumbersome page builder that saves page layout content as custom shortcodes. Once a site is set up with it, the plugin cannot simply be disabled without displaying a lot of nonsense characters within all the content that was built with it.

At 3five we prefer to use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to handle custom custom content because it saves the data as native WordPress metadata, therefore removing a reliance on a plugin if it becomes unneeded in a future redesign or WordPress comes out with a built-in solution.

Completed a plugin audit

At 3five, we believe in a good balance between using existing plugins and developing custom functionality. We don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel, but always carefully consider each plugin installed on a website. With Loll, we removed a few plugins that were completely unnecessary, including one plugin that allows admins, editors, and authors to insert PHP code directly into the WordPress WYSIWYG — a very dangerous risk to security .

Developed a custom theme to replace the previous pre-built theme

Pre-built WordPress themes have their place, especially for projects with a very tight budget, but they are often bloated and programmed without a good strategy for extending and customizing the code. Many also don’t follow any programming standards, such as the WordPress Coding Standards, and are poorly built in terms of code quality and documentation. Developing a completely custom and highly optimized solution from scratch for a client allows us to create a product that exactly meets the project requirements, saving time and money in the long run.