How a 9.5MB WordPress site became a fast one built around thirty before and after sliders, without losing a single ranking or a minute of business email.
John White builds decks, fences, retaining walls, paving and lawns across West Auckland, out of Henderson Valley. He is also a local firefighter, which is the sort of detail that does more for trust than any amount of copy.
He photographs every job before he starts and again when it is finished. Thirty of those pairs existed before we wrote a word, which made the job less about invention and more about getting out of their way.
The homepage loaded 9.5MB, most of it full-size photos straight off a camera. Out west on a couple of bars, it would not finish loading before someone gave up on it.
His before and after photos, far and away the most convincing thing he had, sat in a plain row behind a Portfolio dropdown where almost nobody would find them.
There were typos live on the service pages people actually read, and no privacy policy at all on a site collecting names, numbers and email addresses through a contact form.
Fitting, for a business that sells before and afters.
Every choice came back to one person: a homeowner in West Auckland deciding whether this is the bloke who should build their deck.
Built from scratch as static HTML, deployed on Cloudflare Pages, hosted in his own account from day one.
Every job draggable, on the work page and on the relevant service pages, with the job and suburb in every image tag.
All of his Challenge, Solution and Result write-ups carried across into accordions under each slider, so the keywords stay indexed without the wall of text.
His three project videos embedded as click to load, so an unwatched video costs the page nothing.
Per page titles and descriptions, structured data for the business and the FAQs, a sitemap, and every existing URL kept alive with a 301.
Written from scratch, since he was collecting contact details without one. Analytics is cookieless, so the site needs no consent banner.
Delivers to his inbox with the service, name and suburb already in the subject line, so a reply is one tap.
Moved from Hostinger DNS to Cloudflare with all of his mail records audited and carried across, then verified before the site was pointed over.
The homepage went from 9.5MB to under half a megabyte, with photos converted to WebP and sized for the screen asking for them.
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