Sheboot boost: fixing an awesome org’s slow site

Have you ever visited your own website and immediately felt that something was wrong? It’s not broken or down — just slow. And what’s worse, you have no idea what the issue might be, let alone where to even begin fixing it.

What Gets Measured, Gets Fixed!

Meet our friends SheBoot — a national non-profit with a mission to fuel the next generation of female tech entrepreneurs. They run a bootcamp that helps women founders build their pitch and secure investment, as part of a growing community working to close the funding gap in tech.

Their website, sheboot.ca, brings founders, mentors, and supporters together. But here’s the thing — the site was slow. Frustrating visitors. Undermining credibility. And most importantly, weakening the connection to their mission.

The Problem:  A Site That Didn’t Reflect the Mission

SheBoot’s team knew the site wasn’t performing well. But like many mission-driven leaders, they didn’t have performance data — just instincts and complaints.

They feared fixing it would mean a full rebuild: a new theme, new tech, and most of all, new expenses. The kind of overhaul that can drain a non-profit’s budget fast — money better spent supporting founders instead of developers and designers.

The Approach:  Measure First, Then Act

Instead of blindly throwing fixes at the site, the SheBoot team chose a simpler path: measure what was actually happening.

They leveraged ONIK’s performance monitoring to replace guesswork and gut feelings with real-world data — and that clarity changed everything.

The results were immediate. Between January 2nd and January 5th, the ONIK team tackled SheBoot’s biggest blockers:

• Server response time dropped from 2.5 seconds to 0.025 seconds — a 100× improvement
• Performance scores jumped from the 40s into the 90s — real metrics users and search engines feel
• Core Web Vitals went from failing to passing, delivering a user experience worthy of their mission

Best of all, no expensive rebuild was required — just smart optimizations driven by real data.

The Impact:  Confidence in the User Experience

SheBoot’s mission is about empowering founders. But even organizations with big purpose can be slowed down by small — yet deadly barriers like site performance.

Once the real bottlenecks were identified and measured, the opportunities holding the site back became clear. And they were fixed in days, not months — without slowing down the work that mattered most.

As Julia Elvidge, Chair and Co-Founder of SheBoot, said after the optimization:

“SheBoot.ca is fast! … Optimizing our existing site was inexpensive compared to the alternatives. We use monitoring to make sure our site remains fast as we launch our next bootcamp.”

Julia Elvidge

Read the full SheBoot.ca case study here: https://onik.io/wordpress-performance-optimization—case-study