Malfona Petrini Architettura
Website for Malfona Petrini Architettura, a Rome-based architecture firm: designed and built on WordPress, then rebuilt from scratch in Astro when its performance started to slip.
Context
Malfona Petrini Architettura is a Rome-based architecture firm that rethinks the single-family home as a place where new ways of inhabiting the landscape meet new forms of authorship. Their work spans houses, exhibitions, furniture and publications, and most of it is best told through photographs, drawings and video. The website had to hold all of that and let the projects speak first.
Process
We started with a call to understand the studio’s goals and sketch the architecture of the site: what it needed to contain, who it was for, and how a visitor would move through the work.
Then came the references. I collected a first set, the clients added their own, and I organized everything into moodboards. We reviewed them together: for each reference the clients noted what they liked, what they didn’t, and any idea it sparked. That shared review settled most of the design direction before any page was drawn.
From there the project moved step by step:
- Final site architecture
- Prototypes
- A first usable version with the main pages
- Refinement and validation with the clients
- Upload of the full project archive
Built on WordPress
I built the first version on WordPress with the Uncode theme. It’s a design and development workflow I’ve used for years, and I know it well enough to bend it to almost any design choice.
The clients liked the result, and the site performed well, if not exceptionally: the home page carries a large number of images and videos, and lazy loading and the other optimizations could only do so much.
Rebuilt in Astro
A few months after launch, performance seemed to be slipping, most likely through some mix of WordPress, plugin and hosting updates. Instead of chasing each cause one by one, I made a radical decision: rebuild the whole site from scratch on a more modern and faster stack.
I rebuilt it in Astro, working with Claude, and deployed it on Cloudflare. In about two days everything was back online.
Results
È turbo!
The new site scores 98 for performance and 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO in Lighthouse.
The clients’ reaction the first time they browsed it: “È turbo!” (“It’s turbocharged!”). Take a look at it yourself.