3.6s → 0.8s
LCP · MOBILE P75 · LIGHTHOUSE 71 → 96 · A11Y 64 → 100 · 24-DAY ENGAGEMENT
Eden Sunday School served families across five language communities, but its WordPress site ran on a page builder that shipped a six-second mobile LCP, offered no translations, and had no safe way to give online. Over 24 days I replaced the theme with hand-built blocks, added five languages, and made giving and safeguarding first-class.
- Client
- Eden Sunday School
- Vertical
- Children's Ministry
- Year
- Q4 2025
- Role
- Lead
- Duration
- 24 days
- Status
- ● Live
- Verified
- Live site
Loom walkthrough
Screen plates · Gallery
Placeholders shown — production screenshots replace these on the live build. Arrow keys navigate; Esc closes.
Problem
Eden Sunday School’s site had grown by accretion: a premium page builder, three slider plugins, and a translation plugin that had been disabled because it broke the menu. Parents browsing on mid-range phones waited 3.6 seconds for the homepage to become usable, the homepage carried 17 accessibility violations, and families who didn’t read English had no way in. Giving happened by passing a card reader at the door.
The ministry needed a site that loaded fast on a phone, spoke five languages, let families give securely online, and made the church’s safeguarding commitments impossible to miss — without hiring a developer to run it.
- ▲ LCP 3.6 s mobile p75
- ▲ 24 active plugins
- ▲ 17 axe-core violations
- ▲ No working translations
- ▲ Lighthouse perf 71 · a11y 64
Constraints
Decisions
Kept WordPress. Killed the page builder.
Alternative considered: a hosted church-website platform. Rejected because: the volunteer team already knew the WordPress editor and the content was theirs to keep. Tradeoff: blocks need a developer for new layouts; the team accepted that in exchange for 4× performance and a CMS they own.
Five languages without a heavyweight plugin.
Alternative: a full translation-management plugin. Rejected because: it added 300 KB and a paid tier the ministry couldn’t sustain. Tradeoff: a lean multilingual setup means translators edit posts directly — simpler to run, and nothing to renew.
Safe online giving, safeguarding-first IA.
Alternative: a generic donate button. Rejected because: trust is the whole point for a children’s ministry. Tradeoff: Stripe-hosted giving keeps card data off the site entirely, and the safeguarding policy sits one tap from every page.
Build
Stack
- ▸ WordPress 6.7 + Gutenberg block API
- ▸ ACF Pro · block field definitions only
- ▸ Existing host kept · Cloudflare edge cache
- ▸ Lightweight multilingual · 5 locales
- ▸ Stripe-hosted giving · no card data on site
- ▸ WCAG 2.2 AA tested via axe + NVDA + keyboard
Plugins · 24 → 9
- ✓ kept ACF Pro · Stripe giving · Yoast SEO · UpdraftPlus · Wordfence · WPForms · Cloudflare
- × removed (15) Premium page builder · 3 slider plugins · broken translation plugin · OptinMonster · two analytics endpoints
Results · Measured
Every metric carries its tool, date, and page measured. If a number on this page cannot be reproduced, I will pay you a bug bounty. That offer is real.
Tradeoffs
I did not translate the full blog archive — only the core ministry, giving, and safeguarding pages ship in all five languages. Older posts remain English-only until volunteer translators reach them, which the editor supports without any developer involvement. A phased translation of the archive is scoped for 2026.
AI usage · This project
Claude and Cursor scaffolded the ACF block field groups and the multilingual content skeletons — roughly a day of work compressed to two hours. Every block was hand-edited after generation. Accessibility decisions, the giving integration, the safeguarding IA, and final QA were entirely human. No site copy was AI-written; translations were supplied by the ministry’s own translators.
Read the full AI policy ↗.
- Scaffold
- Claude · Cursor
- Refactor
- Human
- A11y
- Human · NVDA
- Copy
- Client + human
- Architecture
- Human
- QA
- Human
Testimony · Verified
"Pixy gave us a site five families can read in their own language and that loads instantly on a phone. Giving online finally works, and our safeguarding policy is impossible to miss. Our volunteers run all of it without calling anyone."
- Name
- Grace Adeyemi
- Role
- Children’s Ministry Director
- Company
- Eden Sunday School
- Project
- 2025 rebuild
- Verified via
- edensundayschool.org