A Performance Rebuild for a New York Design Studio

Same Design, None of the Weight

Riscala Agnese is a restaurant and interior design studio in New York with a beautiful body of work that was trapped inside a slow, plugin heavy WordPress site. We rebuilt the front end from the theme up, replaced six plugins with lightweight custom code and moved the whole gallery to load on demand. The design never changed, yet the homepage shrank from 1.5 MB to around 104 KB and Google Lighthouse now scores 99 for Performance, 100 for Accessibility and 100 for SEO.
  • Platform
    WordPress
  • Toolkits
    Custom Theme, Custom Development
  • Workflows
    Redesign
  • Location
    USA
  • Industries
    Architecture, Interior
  • Year
    2026

Results at a Glance

Heavy to Lean, Nothing Lost

The numbers below come from Google Lighthouse and the homepage itself, recorded on the finished rebuild with the video hero, the full portfolio and every project photo in place.

99

Lighthouse Performance on the finished site

100

Accessibility, lifted from the low eighties

0

Third party render requests, down from nine

43

Images on first load, down from 294 before

What Needed Solving

A Portfolio Carrying Dead Weight

Riscala Agnese's design work deserved a fast stage. The site underneath was working against the studio on every single visit.

A heavy page on every visit

The homepage carried close to 1.5 MB of HTML and loaded 294 images at once, with none of them saved in modern formats built for speed.

Nine domains, one slow load

Files were pulled from nine different third party domains before the page could settle, and every one of them slowed the opening seconds.

A plugin for every small job

A stack of plugins each handled a job that a few lines of theme code could do, adding weight, updates and risk with every single release.

Same look, none of the load

What We Delivered

Rebuilt From the Theme Up

A rebuild from the theme up

The front end was rebuilt inside a custom WordPress theme, keeping the studio's original design exactly as visitors know it.

Every image turned to WebP

Each image was converted to WebP with proper sizing rules for landscape and portrait, so nothing ships larger than needed.

Zero third party requests

Fonts, CSS and JavaScript are all self hosted, so the finished site makes no render requests to outside domains at all.

A gallery that waits its turn

Project photos and video now load on demand through AJAX, fetched only when a visitor actually opens a project.

A popup in plain JavaScript

The custom project popup cross fades between slides, with keyboard and swipe support, deep links, and photos and video in one frame.

A portfolio the studio runs

Grid order and every project field are editable from the WordPress admin, so new work goes live without a developer.

Motion kept, weight removed

Smooth scrolling is self hosted, the hero leads with video and falls back to an image, and the logo glides as you scroll.

Under the Hood

Six Plugins, Retired

Loaders, scroll to top, custom CSS and JS injection and more were rebuilt as small, purpose built functions inside the theme, and six plugins came off the install. Fewer moving parts means faster pages, fewer updates and less to patch for security, while every feature still works exactly as it did before.

The Outcome

Fast, Accessible and In Control

99 Performance on Lighthouse

Accessibility at a perfect 100

A homepage 93 percent lighter

Every project edited in admin

Photos and video in one popup

Zero third party render calls

Conclusion

Lighter Under the Same Skin

Riscala Agnese kept every visual detail its visitors know and lost the weight they never saw. The homepage dropped from 1.5 MB of HTML to around 104 KB, first load images fell from 294 to 43, and Google Lighthouse now reads 99 for Performance, 100 for Accessibility, 96 for Best Practices and 100 for SEO. New projects go up from the admin in minutes, and there is no plugin stack left to update.

About the Client

Riscala Agnese

Riscala Agnese is a restaurant and interior design studio based in New York. Its site at riscalaagnese.com carries the studio's full portfolio of restaurant and interior work, now running on a fast, custom WordPress theme that the team updates entirely on its own.

Vachan was very accomodating and got the project done in a timely manner, accomplishing all the required tasks. Pleasure to work with

Fadi Riscala

Restaurant Designer

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