We rebuilt our site in 2022 with speed and privacy as the priorities. A few of the changes under the hood:
We removed Google Analytics entirely and switched to Matomo, which is GDPR- and CCPA-compliant by default. We also dropped Google Fonts (after a German court found it non-compliant with GDPR) in favor of self-hosted fonts, and replaced Google Charts — used to display live attack counts on the homepage — with a locally hosted charting library. Fewer calls out to third-party services, less personal data leaving the site.
With Google Analytics gone, we were also able to remove the cookie banner for most visitors — only admin login cookies remain in play. We rebuilt the layout in flexbox instead of Bootstrap for a lighter, faster, more mobile-first site, and cleaned up a lot of bloated template files along the way.
This was, of course, before the WebEnsure rebrand — but the priorities (speed, privacy, less third-party dependency) are exactly the ones the current site was built around too.
