SIM GmbH

Scientific Instruments Manufacturer GmbH – SIM for short – from Oberhausen, Germany, has been developing and selling solutions for chromatography since 1997: systems and accessories for GC and GC/MS, LC and LC/MS, sample preparation and gas management, plus its own analysers such as the MOSH/MOAH LC-GC analyser or pyrolysis GC/MS for determining microplastics.

For laboratories that want to solve a specific measuring problem, the website is the first port of call: hundreds of products and solutions, data sheets and brochures, seminars, news and job offers – in German and English.

Our analysis in summer 2024 found four problems at once:

• Security: the site ran on Joomla 3, which has had no security updates since 17 August 2023.
• Maintenance: every product was a page of its own, built by hand. Adding new products consistently had become close to impossible.
• Speed: CSS and JavaScript alone weighed about 1070 KB.
• Privacy: on the very first visit, before any consent, the home page connected to 5 third-party servers (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com, google.com, maps.googleapis.com, maps.gstatic.com).

The old home page, measured on 8 October 2026:

Drag the slider: the old home page on the left, the new one on the right – same window, taken on the same day.

The heart of the new website is the product catalogue. Every product is an entry with fixed fields – manufacturer, category, pictures, downloads – and content made of building blocks. Templates in YOOtheme Pro turn them into product pages, always in the same layout. A new product means: fill in the fields, done.

The areas GC and GC/MS, LC and LC/MS, sample preparation and gas management are overviews with filters, filled from the catalogue. Data sheets and brochures belong to the product directly, in English too.

Both languages run on our own extension newtastic Languages: every page exists in German and English, the two are linked, and switching the language always leads to the matching page. We took the English product texts and PDFs over from the old website and assigned them to the new products – so nothing SIM had built up over the years got lost.

The new website loads fonts, pictures and scripts from its own server – Google Fonts and Google Maps are gone. On the 9 pages we measured, the old website connected to 9 third-party servers on the very first visit. The new one does so on 8 of the 9 pages not at all; only the contact page still loads the map tiles (ArcGIS) and the newsletter form (Newsletter2Go) from third-party servers.

What does not connect to third parties needs nobody’s permission first.

Less technology, properly delivered pictures and no more Google services – you can see it when the page loads. On the home page the new website transfers 79 % less data, needs 54 % fewer requests, and CSS and JavaScript have shrunk by 92 %:

The goal from our offer – about 130 KB of CSS and JavaScript – the new home page even beats with 118 KB. The old one loaded 1,506 KB, the Google Maps scripts included.

On a phone over a slow mobile network, the largest element of the home page appears after 1.5 s instead of 6.2 s. Across all 9 pages measured, the amount of data drops from 40.19 MB to 4.74 MB:

Measured on 8 October 2026 in the lab like Lighthouse: desktop without throttling, phone with slow 4G and a CPU slowed down four times, five runs each without cache, median. Old website: sim-gmbh.de, new website: the finished version on the test environment before the go-live. SIM supplies the pictures; the new website delivers them in fitting sizes.

On a phone: the old home page on the left, the new one on the right.

SIM reviewed the new website directly on a test environment and wrote to us point by point what was still missing: product tables like in the original, the right pictures for the catalogue, job ads up to date, links from older news. We made every correction so that it can be repeated on the finished site in exactly the same way – so nothing gets lost in the move.

A website on Joomla 3 that talked to Google services and could hardly be maintained has become a fast, bilingual website on Joomla 6: a product catalogue instead of single pages, without Google Fonts and Google Maps, 88 % less data across all pages measured. And a foundation on which SIM adds new products consistently and without detours.