How Nancy Fox Restored Speed, Security, and Stability at Skinny Kitchen After Leaving BigScoots

At a Glance

Key Outcomes

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is critical to overall site health. This single metric impacts every aspect of your website — even a modest improvement ripples downstream through crawling, indexing, ranking, page load, and ultimately user experience.

Testing benchmarks

Every website is benchmarked before and after migration, test yours to compare!

• ttfb.run — Time to First Byte (TTFB)
• securityheaders.ai — Check your security headers

Meet Nancy Fox and Skinny Kitchen

Skinny Kitchen is Nancy Fox's recipe site, built around healthier, Skinnyfied versions of the foods people already love. The site is known for approachable recipes, nutrition facts, practical cooking tips, and food ideas for readers who want comfort food without the usual guilt.

For a recipe publisher, hosting is not just infrastructure. It affects search visibility, reader experience, publishing stability, and the overall health of the business. Quality hosting is the difference between a site that grows and one that quietly degrades.

The Challenge

When Skinny Kitchen arrived at Crave Hosting, the problem was not one isolated issue. The site was carrying years of technical debt, active malware, outdated infrastructure, and unresolved WordPress problems.

Crave Hosting identified 6 active malware and rootkit infections, including:

• Backdoors
• Pharmaceutical spam injections
• PayPal phishing pages
• Malicious code hidden inside an image file
• Additional infections uncovered during remediation

The combination of long-term technical debt and active malware had been quietly eroding the site's performance and trustworthiness. Skinny Kitchen was losing traffic outside of any known Google algorithm update — a pattern that typically points to unresolved infrastructure and security issues compounding over time.

At the same time, the site was running on an outdated stack:

That meant Skinny Kitchen was dealing with both immediate security exposure and long-term performance drag.

What Was Broken Behind the Scenes

A full audit uncovered a series of problems that had quietly piled up over time:

• 6 active malware and rootkit infections
• 7,000+ internal links pointing to insecure or non-canonical URLs
  • 6,540 internal links using http://
  • 655 internal links using the non-www variant
• WordPress autoload over 1,025 KB
• Database bloated to 600+ MB
• Broken sitemap
• Debug logging disabled
• Site Health full of unresolved issues

Individually, each of these issues hurts performance, stability, or maintainability. Together, they create the kind of technical drag that can silently erode traffic, rankings, and user experience.

Why Nancy Made the Move

For Skinny Kitchen, this was not about changing hosts for the sake of it. Nancy needed the site cleaned, stabilized, modernized, and handed back in a state that was safe to grow on again.

That meant solving 4 problems at once:

1. Security
2. Speed
3. Technical debt
4. WordPress maintenance burden

A simple migration would have only moved the same problems somewhere else.

What Crave Hosting Changed

1. Identified and Removed the Malware and Rootkits

Security came first. Crave Hosting identified and removed 6 infections, including hidden backdoors, spam injections, phishing pages, and malware hidden inside media assets.

This immediately improved the site's risk profile and eliminated the most urgent threats.

2. Repaired WordPress and Technical Debt Issues

Crave Hosting then worked through the deeper structural issues affecting the site, including:

• Correcting insecure and non-canonical internal URLs
• Reducing autoload bloat
• Shrinking the database
• Repairing the sitemap
• Restoring debugging visibility
• Resolving outstanding Site Health issues

This was a cleanup project, not just a transfer — and part of our zero technical debt promise.

3. Modernized the Entire Infrastructure Stack

Skinny Kitchen moved from an older, constrained environment to a significantly more capable modern stack.

This gave the site more headroom, stronger performance characteristics, and a far better foundation for WordPress publishing. The difference between profit optimization (BigScoots for Investors) and customer optimization (Crave Hosting for Owners) is clear.

Migration Timeline

The full project was completed in 7 days, and everything outlined here was included with Nancy's plan.

One noteworthy challenge was backup retrieval from the previous host, where download delays sometimes took longer than the migration itself.

The Results

The most immediate improvement was speed.

TTFB dropped from 507ms to 46ms, a 91% improvement. For a WordPress recipe site, that changes the entire page experience and creates a much stronger base for search and usability.

This also significantly improves:

• Cost of retrieval
• Site crawling
• Content indexing
• Improved ranking

Infrastructure improvements were also substantial:

• CPU benchmark throughput increased by 464%
• Disk write throughput improved by 310%
• Disk read throughput improved by 471%
• Memory bandwidth improved from 199 MB/s to 219 MB/s

On the WordPress side:

• Autoload size dropped by 46%
• Database size dropped by 32%

Just as importantly, the site was no longer carrying active malware, broken internal URL structures, or an outdated stack.

Business Impact

For Nancy, this was bigger than a hosting move. It was a reset.

Instead of continuing to operate on a compromised, bloated, outdated setup, Skinny Kitchen came out of the project with:

• A safer platform
• Faster performance
• Less technical drag
• Fewer outside services to manage
• A stronger foundation for recovery and growth for her business

The owner was also able to cancel and consolidate several subscriptions under Crave Hosting, including:

• BigScoots
• WPRM
• Kadence
• Perfmatters
• External WordPress management

That reduced ongoing complexity and put more of the stack under one accountable provider that takes full responsibility so you can focus entirely on your business and growth.

Final Takeaway

Skinny Kitchen did not need a cosmetic hosting change. It needed deep cleanup, real remediation, and a modern foundation.

In 7 days, Crave Hosting removed 6 infections, dramatically improved speed, modernized the stack, reduced WordPress bloat, and handed Nancy Fox a cleaner platform to grow from.