Performance Case Study: Backbone Adventures

The Website

Backbone Adventures offers ATV, Jeep, e-bike, Slingshot, and snowmobile rentals in Estes Park, Colorado – one of the most visited destinations in the state. Online bookings are their primary revenue driver, handled through an embedded FareHarbor booking system.

The Problem

The site was scoring 32 on mobile PageSpeed and 65 on desktop, with a load time of 5.3 seconds and a Best Practices score of 58 out of 100. The site was on a slower hosting stack with no active caching plugin in place.

At 5.3 seconds on mobile, this site was statistically losing more than half its mobile visitors before the page finished loading, during a peak outdoor tourism season when mobile traffic is at its highest.

What We Found

The audit – based on a full GTMetrix HAR file analysis, both mobile and desktop PageSpeed Insights reports, and a review of the page source – revealed a site with several compounding problems.

The single largest issue: FareHarbor’s booking system was loading approximately 9MB of JavaScript on every page visit – the homepage, the about page, every trail page – not just on pages where booking actually happens. This is the default behavior of an inline FareHarbor embed and it was dominating the page weight.

Other issues we found:

• A YouTube embed was loading 7MB of YouTube player assets before anyone clicked play.
• The hero video, while smaller than on some sites, was downloading for every visitor including those on cellular.
• Three separate analytics tools were running simultaneously – Google Tag Manager, MonsterInsights, and Google Site Kit – none of them fully configured.
• The Birdeye review widget was loading 13 network requests on initial page load, before most visitors had scrolled anywhere near the reviews section.

What We Did

The biggest single fix was deferring FareHarbor. Using PerfMatters’ Delay JavaScript feature, FareHarbor now loads only after user interaction – a mouse move, scroll, or click – rather than on page load. This removed 9MB from the initial load waterfall entirely. Every booking link and lightbox was tested thoroughly before confirming this fix.

The YouTube embed received the same facade treatment used on other sites – thumbnail image plus click-to-play, with the actual player loading only on interaction.

The hero video was compressed from 7.2MB to 4.4MB, a preload=”none” snippet was added, and a poster image was created for instant visual feedback.

Other fixes:

• Breeze caching was installed and configured for the Cloudways/Varnish hosting stack.
• JavaScript deferral was enabled via PerfMatters with Usercentrics scripts excluded per Termageddon’s recommended configuration.
• The Birdeye widget was converted to lazy load using an IntersectionObserver snippet – it now initializes only when a visitor scrolls to the reviews section.
• MonsterInsights was removed, consolidating the analytics setup.

The Results

The Best Practices score moving from 58 to 100 was a notable secondary result – FareHarbor’s deferred loading resolved several deprecated API warnings that were dragging the score down.

The Takeaway

Booking system embeds are one of the most impactful and most overlooked performance problems on tourism and rental websites. FareHarbor, Rezdy, and similar platforms are designed to be embedded globally – but loading their full JavaScript payload on every page visit, not just booking pages, silently costs you visitors and conversions every day. Deferring that load to user interaction is one of the highest-impact fixes available on sites that use these systems.