F1 Chronicle
F1 Chronicle covers the fastest sport on earth, but its website took ten seconds to load. We rebuilt it on a lean custom WordPress theme, and the bounce rate fell from 90-95% to 30-35%. Five years and thousands of articles later, the site still runs on our build.
A performance rebuild that took F1 Chronicle from an F-grade, eight-to-ten-second site to an A+ score and a bounce rate of 30-35%, on a custom theme the publication still runs today.
The Challenge
What we were solving
F1 Chronicle is a Formula 1 news site publishing news, results, opinion and technical analysis, alongside the Grid Talk podcast. Its strategy is unusual for a news publisher: rather than racing rivals to break stories on social media, founder Jarrod Partridge built the site search-first, aiming for sustained organic growth from evergreen guides and analysis.
That strategy lives or dies on the website. And the website was dying. The original build came from a $200 freelancer, and it showed: a bloated theme, buggy and unused plugins, massive unoptimised images, cheap hosting and no CDN. Pages took eight to ten seconds to load, and GTmetrix graded the site an F. For a publication whose whole subject is speed, the irony was hard to miss (and readers did not wait around for the punchline: bounce rate sat at 90-95%).
Slow pages also cost a media business twice. Readers leave before the page renders, and the ad revenue that funds the publication leaves with them. F1 Chronicle needed a platform that could carry daily publishing volume, hold visitors long enough to read, and give advertisers an audience worth paying for.
Success meant pages loading in about two seconds without losing the bold hero photography a news site needs, on any screen size.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Audit before you touch anything
We started by monitoring the site and auditing what was actually slowing it down, rather than guessing. The audit separated three layers of problems: a theme carrying weight it did not need, a plugin stack full of slow or abandoned tools, and infrastructure (hosting and delivery) that would throttle the site no matter what the code did. Each layer got its own fix, tested in sequence over a fortnight so we could see exactly what each change bought.
A lean custom theme, not another off-the-shelf one
The old theme came out entirely. In its place we built a custom, responsive, retina-ready HTML5 WordPress child theme on the Beaver Builder framework, stripped down to what a news site actually uses. The plugin stack was cut back hard: unused plugins removed, underperformers swapped for tools we trust, and Imagify added to compress the site's image-heavy pages without visible quality loss.
Fix the foundations the code sits on
No theme survives bad hosting. We moved F1 Chronicle to our trusted hosting provider, which included a free CDN, so pages are served from close to readers wherever in the world a race weekend finds them. Every upgrade across the two weeks was tested before the next one went in.
The Solution
What we delivered
The client reported the bounce rate drop overnight, along with a lift in search traffic. That is the number that matters for a publisher: two in three visitors now stay and read instead of nineteen in twenty leaving.
The build has also lasted. F1 Chronicle publishes daily through the 2026 season on the same Chillybin child theme, with the site reporting monthly pageviews in the tens of thousands through the racing calendar. The engagement did not stop at the rebuild either: we have supported the site in the years since, and the relationship produced more than one project.
Disclosure: Jarrod later went on to work with the Chillybin team. This project, and his words above, predate that.
What we learned
Cheap builds are expensive. F1 Chronicle saved money on a $200 freelance build, then paid for it in lost ad revenue and a full rebuild. The post-cleanup analysis showed the total came to more than doing it properly the first time. It is the clearest before-and-after we have of what a budget build actually costs a business whose product is its website.
Performance work rewards sequencing. Theme, plugins and hosting each mask the others' problems: a fast theme on slow hosting still reads as a slow site. Auditing first, then fixing one layer at a time with a test after each change, is slower than a big-bang relaunch and far more certain.
And bounce rate is the honest metric for publishers. Speed scores are a proxy; whether a reader stays is the business. When a site goes from losing nineteen visitors in twenty to keeping two in three, everything downstream (pageviews, ad impressions, search rankings) moves with it.
