Performance Case Study: Estes Park ATV Rentals

The Website

Estes Park ATV Rentals offers ATV, UTV, and off-road vehicle rentals near Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Their business runs on online bookings, and their customers are finding them on mobile devices while planning trips – often on cellular data in a mountain town.

The Problem

The site was scoring 32 out of 100 on mobile PageSpeed and taking nearly 5 seconds to load. Google Site Kit was flagging the performance as poor. Real-user Core Web Vitals were passing, but the underlying issues were real and worsening.

Research shows 53% of mobile visitors abandon pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load. At 4.9 seconds, this site was losing more than half its mobile visitors before they ever saw the booking options.

What We Found

Starting with a full HAR file analysis, PageSpeed Insights data, and a review of the site’s HTML source, the Performance Audit identified the issues in order of impact:

• The home page video was 57MB and downloading in full for every visitor, including people on cellular data who might never interact with it.
• A YouTube embed was loading approximately 5MB of YouTube player code on page load – before anyone clicked play.

Together, these two items accounted for the majority of the site’s 60MB page weight.

Beyond the media issues:

• 18 separate CSS files loading where 4 would do
• Two Google Analytics tracking IDs firing simultaneously
• An unused plugin generating console errors on every visit
• Usercentrics consent scripts loading in an order that was slowing down the first render.

What We Did

Phase 1 work focused on the highest-impact items first:

• The hero video was compressed from 57MB to 5.9MB using H.264 encoding with audio removed – a muted background video has no need for an audio track.
• A preload=”none” attribute was added so the video no longer downloads on page load, and a poster image was added for instant visual feedback while the video buffers.
• The YouTube embed was replaced with a facade – a static thumbnail image with a play button overlay. The actual YouTube player only loads when a visitor clicks play, removing 5MB from every page load.
• CSS combining via LiteSpeed Cache brought the CSS request count from 18 to 4.
• The duplicate Google Analytics tracking was consolidated by removing MonsterInsights, leaving a single properly configured setup.
• PushEngage, an unused plugin generating errors on every page load, was removed entirely.
• Usercentrics scripts were added to the LiteSpeed exclusion list per Termageddon’s recommended configuration.

The Results

Core Web Vitals remained passing throughout. The site’s desktop score of 96 puts it in the top tier for WordPress performance.

The Takeaway

Media files – video and video embeds – are the most commonly overlooked performance problem on tourism and outdoor recreation sites. A beautifully shot background video is great for the brand. Loading the full file for every visitor regardless of whether they interact with it is not. The fix is straightforward and the impact is immediate.