A century-old manufacturer, built to perform.
Vendome Copper & Brass Works has been building stills in Louisville since 1903. Shaun Wilson Designs designed and built vendomecopper.com and has run it since. In 2026 the site moved onto our dedicated server and was rebuilt underneath: faster, more secure and simpler to run, without changing a thing a visitor would notice.
Vendome Copper & Brass Works
Louisville, Kentucky
Industrial manufacturing
Design, build, hosting, performance
The website for the people who build the stills.
Vendome’s customers are distilleries, breweries, food and chemical processors, and the engineers who specify equipment for them. The site has to present a hundred and twenty years of craft with the clarity a procurement team expects: products, capabilities, history and a direct route to a quote.
Over years of service the platform underneath had drifted: shared hosting, an image proxy rewriting every picture through a third party, a database carrying years of clutter, and an encryption path that stopped short of the origin. None of it was visible to a visitor. All of it was costing speed.
Same design, same content, nothing removed. Roughly seven times faster.
Homepage response from about one second to 0.14 seconds at the origin.
Exact screens, not mockups.
These are direct browser captures of the live site at 1440 and 390 pixels. Nothing redrawn, nothing staged.
The work, piece by piece.
Design and build
The Vendome website itself: products, capabilities, company history, news and quote requests, built in WordPress and maintained by Shaun Wilson Designs since launch.
Dedicated server, current PHP
Moved off shared hosting onto our dedicated server, with server-side page caching and Cloudflare in front.
Jetpack removed
Jetpack was rewriting every image through a third-party proxy and silently blocking the WebP images already generated. Homepage WebP sources went from 1 to 36.
Database cleaned
From 448 MB to 314 MB, and three plugins that no longer earned their place retired.
Encrypted end to end
A proper certificate issued and Cloudflare moved to Full (Strict), so the whole path is encrypted, not just the front half.
Nothing visible changed
Same design, same content, same URLs. The visitor sees the same Vendome, only faster.
Built for every screen it will meet.
1903
The year Vendome started building stills
0.14s
Origin response, down from roughly one second
36
Homepage WebP sources, up from 1
134 MB
Database weight removed
From roughly one second to 0.12 seconds.
Homepage response fell from roughly one second to 0.12 to 0.19 seconds for visitors, and to 0.14 seconds at the origin. Same design, same content, nothing removed: the site we built, now on infrastructure we run.
Every number here was measured before and after the work, not estimated.
Built in Louisville, for Louisville and Southern Indiana.
Shaun Wilson Designs is a one-person web design and WordPress development studio in Louisville, Kentucky, working with businesses across Louisville and Southern Indiana: custom WordPress websites, custom WordPress plugins, WooCommerce stores, website redesigns and WordPress recovery. See more of the work in the project portfolio.
Tell me what you are building.
One conversation, one builder, a clear next step. The person you brief is the person who does the work.
