My One-Week Experience Creating an Agency Portfolio Site in WordPress
A 7-Day Developer Diary: Building a Faster Agency Portfolio Website
Last week a client asked me to rebuild their creative agency website. Their old site looked fine at first glance, but it had a lot of problems. Pages loaded slowly, the portfolio section was messy, and editing content took too much time.
I decided to document the process like a short work diary.
Day 1 — Picking the Foundation
The client wanted a modern portfolio website that could show case studies, team members, and project galleries without needing custom coding for every page.
After testing several options, I started with Creaox - Creative Agency Portfolio WordPress Theme.
The first thing I checked was not the homepage design. I looked at how portfolio items were structured. Many agency themes look great in demos but become difficult to manage once you have 50 or 100 projects.
This one had a cleaner content structure, which saved time later.
Day 3 — Fixing a Small Problem
By the third day I found a minor issue.
The default portfolio thumbnails were larger than what the client needed. This wasn't a bug, but it caused unnecessary image weight on archive pages.
Instead of manually editing images, I added a simple filter in the child theme:
add_filter('post_thumbnail_size', function() {
return 'medium_large';
});
That reduced image sizes across the portfolio section and improved loading speed without changing the design.
Not a huge problem, but it's the kind of thing I run into on real projects all the time.
Day 5 — Cleaning Up Performance
The client's old website had more than 30 active plugins.
Many were no longer being used.
After removing unused plugins, I ran several WP-CLI commands to clear old transients and optimize the database.
wp transient delete --all
wp cache flush
I also checked database tables and found some leftover plugin data that had been sitting there for years.
The site instantly felt more responsive in the admin area.
A lot of people focus only on front-end speed, but backend performance matters too when clients update content every day.
Day 7 — Final Testing
The last day was mostly testing.
I reviewed the website on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
One thing I always check is whether visitors can reach important information quickly.
For agency websites, that usually means:
Portfolio
Services
About page
Contact form
If users need five or six clicks to find those pages, something is wrong.
I also added a simple Nginx rule to improve browser caching for static files:
location ~* \.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|png|webp)$ {
expires 30d;
}
It's a small change, but it helps reduce repeat loading times.
What I Liked
The portfolio system was easy to organize.
The layout worked well for agencies that want to show real project work instead of filling pages with animations.
The theme was also simple enough that the client could manage content without calling me every week.
What Could Be Better
The documentation could include a few more examples for portfolio customization.
I figured everything out quickly, but beginners may spend extra time searching for specific settings.
After seven days, the finished website was faster, easier to manage, and much cleaner than the old version.
The biggest lesson wasn't about design.
It was about structure.
Most agency websites don't fail because they look bad. They fail because visitors can't quickly understand what the company does and where to find the work.
Once those problems were fixed, everything else became much easier.
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