FMTweak, rebuilt and faster.
FMTweak is a Football Manager mods and guides site that lives on Google traffic and ads. It had grown into a page builder, a shelf of old themes and dozens of plugins. Here is how it was rebuilt and switched over in one night, with the figures from before and after.
- Live since 9 October 2026
- PageSpeed 91 on mobile
- Database from 150 MB to 13 MB
- Every old address redirected
The site and the problem.
FMTweak publishes match engines, mod guides and fixes for Football Manager, and it pays for itself with display ads. Almost all its visitors arrive from Google, so speed and keeping every address working matter more than anything else.
By 2026 it ran on a bought theme with Elementor on top, which is how a lot of small business sites are built. Over the years that had gathered:
- Elementor, two more page builders and two theme frameworks, all loading on every page.
- Five themes installed and never used (Divi, Extra, Newspaper, The7 and Mow) next to the one that was.
- Dozens of plugins, several doing the same job: three SVG uploaders, two contact form plugins with no forms on the site, two consent tools.
- A 150 MB database, 46 MB of it Elementor’s copies of page layouts.
- Pages that Cloudflare was not set up to cache, and a caching plugin whose headers would have stopped it anyway.
None of it was broken, exactly. It was slow, hard to change, and every update was a risk.
What we did.
A theme built for the site
A custom WordPress theme from an approved design, with no page builder. Editing stays in WordPress, with fields that match each part of the page.
Content moved, not retyped
Posts, match engines, menus and settings were packaged on the test site and merged into the live one by script, so nothing written on live in the meantime was lost.
Every old address kept
The 29 addresses from the old theme’s pages redirect to their new home, so links from forums and Google keep working.
Plugins and themes cleared
More than 30 plugins and 7 old themes removed, the site checked after they were switched off and again after they were deleted. Eight plugins remain.
The database cleaned
Tables left by removed plugins, old page-builder data, 1,120 old revisions and thousands of stale settings, cleared after a fresh backup.
Pages cached at the edge
Cloudflare now serves pages from its own cache, and clears it whenever a post is published.
The numbers, before and after.
Measured on the live site on 9 and 10 October 2026. PageSpeed figures are Google’s mobile test of the same article page.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| PageSpeed, mobile | 70 | 91 |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 6.2 s | 2.1 s |
| Served from Cloudflare’s cache | No | Yes, in about 0.08 s |
| Database | 150 MB | 13 MB |
| Plugins folder | 357 MB | 78 MB |
| Themes folder | 193 MB | 9 MB |
The “before” PageSpeed test ran on the new theme with the old plugins still installed, just before they were removed. The old Elementor theme was not measured in the same way, so it is not in the table.
The switch, in one night.
The whole switch was scripted and rehearsed first on a copy of the live site. The rehearsal found five problems, from a redirect that clashed with an uploaded file to a setup step that wiped the tagline, and each was fixed in the script before the real run.
On the night, with full backups of the database and files taken first, the new theme went live, the content was merged, and every page, redirect, ad slot and analytics tag was checked. The old plugins and themes were only deleted afterwards, once the new site had been checked, so going back stayed a single command until then.
One lesson, now in the checklist: installing a plugin from the command line takes down WordPress’s maintenance page when it finishes. For a few minutes of the import, visitors could see the site mid-switch. Next time, plugins go in before maintenance mode goes on.
What it did not fix.
FMTweak carries display ads, and the ad network’s scripts are now the slowest part of every page: about 400 KB of code that Braw does not control. Because pages load faster, the ads now load during Google’s test, which is why its blocking-time figure rose from 20 ms to 320 ms even as the overall score went up.
The ads also cost points elsewhere in the same test: accessibility 85 and best practices 69, mostly from the ad bar and its cookies. A small share is the theme’s own, the contrast of text on orange buttons, and that is on the list to fix.
Every new Braw build launches scoring 90 or more on mobile PageSpeed, with the report.
Questions about a rebuild
Ask us something else →Is my site slow for the same reasons?
It may be. A page builder, plugins that overlap and caching that is switched on but not working are what slowed FMTweak down, and they are worth ruling out first on any WordPress site. The free website check looks at speed on phones and tells you what is behind it.
Will I lose my Google rankings in a rebuild?
Not if every old address is redirected to its new page and the content is kept, which is how FMTweak was switched. Rankings are lost when addresses change without redirects, or when pages are dropped.
Do I need a full rebuild?
Not always. Removing plugins, cleaning the database and fixing caching can be done on the site you have, and that is part of Braw Support. A rebuild makes sense when the theme or page builder itself is the problem.
Is your site slowing you down?
Send us the address. We will tell you what is making it slow and what it would take to fix, whether that is a clean-up or a rebuild.
Talk about your site →