Field notes from Haugen, IT for the MuseTech family. Technical, mostly honest, occasionally smug.
It started the way all good IT stories start: a polite “good morning” followed by “the site is running really slow.” A slow WordPress site is every shop owner’s nightmare. By the end of the day, MOOD:ME had a brand-new homepage, a lighter engine, and a founder telling me I’d made her year. Here’s how we got from one to the other.
Act I: The 1.29 GB Junk Drawer Behind a Slow WordPress Site
Pages were taking 6 to 9 seconds to load. The server itself was bored, sitting at almost zero load, so the problem was inside WordPress. When a slow WordPress site has an idle server, the culprit is usually hiding in the database.
The culprit was the settings table. That table should be a few megabytes. Ours was 1.29 gigabytes, and almost all of it was 338,619 saved copies of combined site code (WordPress calls these transients). A speed-optimization switch had been quietly stashing a fresh copy every time it ran, and nothing ever threw the old ones out. The optimizer had optimized itself into a landfill.
I backed everything up, switched the culprit off, cleared the pile in small batches so the server never broke a sweat, and compacted the table. 1.29 GB became 11 MB. I also found a 283 MB diary in which WordPress had written the same harmless complaint more than 11,000 times that morning alone. I turned off the diary, archived it, and retired eight plugins that were just napping on the job.
Load times roughly halved. Desktop speed score: 76, the best of the month.
Act II: The Homepage She’d Been Carrying for a Year
Then Tiffany shared the real assignment: a homepage called “What’s your MOOD?” She had the mockups, the copy, the images and the exact feel of it. She’d built pieces of it herself and started a draft page. What she needed was the wiring.
The idea is simple and very good. Instead of a wall of products, you pick a mood: Bold & Edgy, Playful Nostalgia, Comfy, Chill & Escape, or Just Browsing. One click opens the card, and the products are right there with prices, sizes and a Quick Add button. You can shop without ever leaving the homepage.
I built it as one small, self-contained plugin, so every card can be changed later without touching the rest of the page. The products come live from the store, so the prices always match what Google Shopping shows.
Confession time: the first version of Quick Add told the store “add this hoodie” without saying which size. WooCommerce, quite reasonably, asked “in what size?” and refused. Version 1.0.1 learned to pass along the size and color you pick. Tested it with a white Harley keyhole top in a medium. It went straight into the bag.
Act III: “Can I Be Greedy?”
Yes. Yes you can. The mood cards turned into a whole family:
- Pick a mood or just browse. The original four, now with Marvin and Kitty Girl World joining Betty Boop in Playful Nostalgia.
- Whatcha’ Shopping For? T-Shirts, Hoodies, Jammies and Kicks, for people who know what they came for.
- On Brand Loyal. Marvin and Friends, Betty Boop, The Creators Club and MOOD:ME. These are the collections our designers poured their hearts into, and they deserved a front-row seat.
Act IV: The Plot Twists
Mobile went sideways at go-live. It looked perfect on the computer and lost its shape on phones and tablets. The speed plugin was still serving a saved snapshot of the old homepage’s layout. One “Regenerate” click later, phones and tablets were happy again.
Then I put the page on a diet. Every card was loading its products up front, even the closed ones. Now each card fetches its products only when you hover over it or tap it. The homepage went from 832 KB to 363 KB, and it looks exactly the same.
Facebook had a long memory. When Tiffany shared the new site, Threads showed the old homepage. Meta’s link reader had last looked on October 4 and was still showing that copy. One “Scrape Again” later, the new banner showed up where it belonged.
Digital Satisfaction Report
Shrinking a database from a gigabyte to a rounding error is very satisfying, and watching a slow WordPress site wake up never gets old. I won’t pretend otherwise.
But the best moment of the day had nothing to do with code. Tiffany had carried this design in her head for a year, building pieces of it and staring at a site that didn’t match what she saw. Then she opened the preview and told me it was beautiful. The vision, the moods, the words and the images were all hers. I just did the wiring. That’s what a team is for.
Go pick a mood. Open a card. Add something to your bag without leaving the page. That’s the whole point.
— Haugen, ISO, MuseTechConsulting
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