No more house of cards: How a WordPress cleanup gave Nicole her website back
Solopreneur Website
Project at a glance
Nicole König runs EcoQuent, a sustainable marketing consultancy helping NGOs, nonprofits, and green entrepreneurs communicate their impact. Her WordPress site had been “made sustainable” by a previous designer — but the setup left her afraid to touch her own website.
I cleaned up the mess and migrated her to solid, sustainable hosting.
What we focused on
- Migration to sustainable Managed WordPress Hosting at Raidboxes
- Removing unnecessary plugins and replacing others with lightweight alternatives
- Database and file cleanup
- Security, performance, and sustainability through hosting features instead of heavy plugins
- Small design fixes: spacing, buttons, text legibility, header and footer alignment
What gives Nicole peace of mind
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Before: Where we started
Nicole’s site wasn’t broken. It looked fine. It even had a pretty good carbon rating. But behind the scenes, it was a different story.
A previous web designer had rebuilt the site with sustainability in mind — and then loaded it with 11 plugins, a second page builder (installed for a single button?!), and a database cluttered with leftover data from uninstalled plugins and a staging site that had no business being there.
Her website:
- sent daily security alert emails that made Nicole anxious
- required a lot of updates for all the plugins
- made it nearly impossible to simply add a new blog post
- weighed 4 GB when it should have been a fraction of that
Nicole didn’t need a redesign. She needed someone to untangle the mess and give her a website she could trust again.
A mutual contact connected us when I was originally looking for honest conversations about sustainable web design gone wrong — but my approach convinced Nicole I was the right person to fix her site.
The Process: Stripping back to what matters
What changed for Nicole
From the outside, the site looks nearly the same. That’s the point.
This project wasn’t about a new look. It was about removing everything that stood between Nicole and a website she could use with confidence.
No more security anxiety. The daily alert emails are gone. Not because we’re ignoring security — because it’s now handled properly at the hosting level, quietly and reliably.
A website she can manage. Small but meaningful fixes to spacing, button styling, and the header and footer make the site feel more polished. Text went from light to regular weight for easier reading. Images are now easy to swap out. These are the kinds of changes that make day-to-day management feel effortless instead of risky.
What happened under the hood
If you’re curious about what “cleaning up a WordPress site” actually means, this one’s for you. Everyone else, feel free to skip to the results.
Read the nerdy details
Plugin purge: from 11 to 4. Seven plugins were removed entirely. Three were replaced with lighter, less intrusive alternatives. The previous setup included a second page builder — installed for one single button. That’s like hiring a moving truck to deliver a letter.
Database cleanup: 75% smaller. The database was cluttered with leftover tables from uninstalled plugins and an entire staging site that lived in the production database. After cleanup, roughly 75% of the data was gone.
File size: from 4 GB to 1 GB. With the plugin bloat removed, the total installation shrank to a quarter of its original size.
Security without the noise. Instead of multiple overlapping security plugins, we now use Raidboxes’ built-in firewall, security headers, and wp-config hardening. Five lines of code and a few toggles replaced what used to be multiple heavy plugins (and daily scare emails).
Performance and sustainability built in. Font files were subset for faster loading. We’re now using the regular instead of the light font weight for body text for better legibility. Caching and performance optimization are handled at the hosting level, not through yet another plugin. The result is a faster, lighter, genuinely sustainable site.
Results and impact
Why this project matters
Nicole’s story is more common than you’d think. A well-meaning redesign that adds complexity instead of removing it. A “sustainable” setup that’s anything but. A website owner who ends up more dependent and more anxious than before.
Sometimes the most impactful web project isn’t a flashy relaunch. It’s giving someone their website back.
- Zero security scare emails — because security is built in, not bolted on
- 57% less CO2 per page visit — from 0.07g to 0.03g
- Twice as fast — page speed dropped from 2.9 to 1.4 seconds
- 75% less database bloat — cleaned out years of digital debris
This is a foundation for growth. Nicole is working with a brand designer on a brand refresh, which will lead to a website redesign as well. That will be easier now because the technical foundation is solid. No more house of cards.
Is your website secretly a mess?
Here’s the truth: Not every messy website can be cleaned up in a week for cheap. Nicole’s luck was that hers was already built with WordPress and Kadence Pro—a strong foundation.
Most of my clients switch from other WordPress pagebuilders or even different website platforms like Wix and Squarespace.
But with any reLaunch — strategy, branding, and build — I make sure your site ends up on the same strong tech foundations as Nicole’s.
This case study illustrates the point that WordPress itself is not the problem, the setup is.
You can learn more about what makes a good website setup on my blog.