Case studies

Traditional stonemasons · Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Jackson's Stonemasonry

A one-page site that named neither the business nor the county it works in, replaced by a 39-page site built around twelve real jobs.

  • Largest Contentful Paint 6.0simproved to2.3s 62% faster Inside Google’s 2.5 second pass mark.
  • Lighthouse Performance 61improved to96 +57% Google’s own audit of the page, out of 100.
  • WCAG AA accessibility 88improved to100 Perfect score Usable with a screen reader, a keyboard, or poor eyesight.
  • Pages on the site 1improved to39 +3,800% more content Every service, area and job now has a page of its own.

Where they started

Jackson’s had a single-page website built in a hosted page builder. It was tidy enough, and it worked on a phone. What it did not do was say who they were or where they worked: the page title read “Expert Stonemasonry Services — Quality Craftsmanship Guaranteed”, which is the line a search engine shows as the clickable headline, spent entirely on words no customer types.

There was no LocalBusiness record, so nothing told Google the trading area, the hours or the phone number. And for a trade that sells on what it has built, the whole site carried two photographs.

What changed

The rebuild is organised around the work: twelve case studies, each one a real job with before and after photographs, written from what the masons actually did. Services, areas covered and reviews each have their own pages, and the structured data now describes a stonemason in Gloucestershire rather than nothing at all.

It also had to be quick. The webfont was being fetched from Google, which cost close to a second before a letter appeared — most of it spent opening a connection to a second server rather than moving any font. Serving it from the site itself took the load time from six seconds to a little over two, inside the threshold Google treats as a pass.

Measured before and after the rebuild
MeasureBeforeAfter
Pages targeting a service09
Pages targeting a town or area08
Jobs written up as case studies014
Photographs of their work213
Schema.org LocalBusiness recordNonePublished
Lighthouse best practices92100
Page title in Google results“Expert Stonemasonry Services” — no business name, no county“Stonemasons in Cheltenham & the Cotswolds | Jackson’s Stonemasonry”

Dog walking & pet care · Basingstoke, Hampshire

Basingstoke K9 Companions

Five pages on a free subdomain, with a home page titled “Home”, rebuilt onto its own domain and now loading in under two seconds.

  • Largest Contentful Paint 8.7simproved to1.8s 79% faster From waiting to arriving. Google’s pass mark is 2.5 seconds.
  • Lighthouse Performance 64improved to100 +56% Google’s own audit of the page, out of 100.
  • WCAG AA accessibility 96improved to100 Perfect score Usable with a screen reader, a keyboard, or poor eyesight.
  • Pages on the site 5improved to11 +120% more content A page for every service, on their own domain.

Where they started

The business ran on a free builder subdomain rather than its own domain, which meant every link and every search result pointed somewhere that belonged to the platform. The home page title was the single word “Home”, and the page carried no heading at all — so the two things a search engine reads first said nothing about dog walking, and nothing about Basingstoke.

The largest element on the page took 8.7 seconds to appear on a mobile connection. Google treats anything over 2.5 seconds as a failure, and most people looking for a dog walker are on a phone.

What changed

The site now runs on its own domain, with a short second domain redirecting to it. Every page has a real title and a single clear heading, and there is a LocalBusiness record describing the service area and hours.

It loads in 1.8 seconds on mobile — inside Google’s threshold rather than three times outside it — and scores 99 for performance.

Measured before and after the rebuild
MeasureBeforeAfter
Headings on the home page01
Page title in Google results“Home”“Dog Walker in Basingstoke | The K9 Companions”
Their own web addressNo — a website builder’s subdomainYes, plus a short one
Schema.org LocalBusiness recordNonePublished
Lighthouse best practices96100

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