Case study · Landscaping
A 23-second mobile load and traffic halving year-on-year. We locked the “before”, rebuilt it to our full standard — and it's live.
Perth, WAWebsite rebuild & performanceLive · ongoing
The situation
Perth Landscaping Experts is an established landscaping business whose website had quietly become a liability. On mobile, the largest content took 23.3 seconds to paint — nine times Google's “poor” threshold. Desktop layout shift was in the red too. And the numbers behind it were sliding: organic sessions had fallen from 37,000 to 17,100 year-on-year, and conversions from 961 to 441 — both down about 54% — as the ageing site lost ground to competitors who'd invested.
What was at stake
A 23-second mobile load means almost nobody waits — they're gone before the page appears. Traffic halving year-on-year isn't a plateau, it's a slide, and on an old WordPress site with no active programme behind it, that slide doesn't stop on its own. Every month of delay is market share handed to the competitors who rebuilt first.
What we did
Before touching anything, we captured the full old-site baseline — Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals and a year of analytics — and froze it to evidence. That's how every Salty case study works: we prove the “after” against a real “before”, not a vibe.
This build is our reference implementation of the Salty website standard — Next.js served from Cloudflare's edge, AVIF imagery, a clean component system and Core Web Vitals engineered in from the start. Our comparable landscaping build on the same standard runs 94 on mobile and 99 on desktop, with a sub-one-second desktop paint.
Not just fast — complete. Analytics and consent, session heatmaps, structured data, security headers, sitemaps, an AI-crawler policy, a conversion-focused copy layer and accessibility baked in. The things most rebuilds skip, we ship as standard on every site.
The proof
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint — mobile | 23.3s | 4.2s | 5.5× faster |
| Performance — desktop | 64 | 97 | +33 |
| Performance — mobile | 67 | 84 | +17 |
| Cumulative Layout Shift — desktop | 0.263 | 0 | eliminated |
| Largest Contentful Paint — desktop | 4.1s | 1.1s | −3.0s |
| Organic sessions (year-on-year) | 37,008 | 17,116 | −54% inherited — recovery tracked |
| Conversions (year-on-year) | 961 | 441 | −54% inherited — recovery tracked |
Before = the old WordPress site, frozen the morning of cutover (2026-07-15). After = the live Next.js site on day 0 (PageSpeed Insights, 2026-07-16). Mobile paint still measures 4–10s run-to-run while the hero image is re-encoded — the 4.2s is the day-0 reading, disclosed as such. The organic rows are the decline we inherited; the recovery is measured monthly against that frozen baseline.
The result
The rebuild is live: a 23-second mobile load is now about four, desktop paints in about a second, and the layout no longer shifts. That's day one. The real story this case study tracks is the recovery — organic traffic and enquiries measured month-on-month against a two-year slide we froze before touching anything. When those numbers land, they'll be real, dated and published here.
What this means for you
Speed is the floor, not the finish. A proper rebuild means capturing where you started, engineering the performance in, and shipping every standard — measurement, schema, conversion, accessibility — so the site earns from day one and improves provably from there. We treat the “before” as sacred, because it's what makes the “after” mean something.
Book a 30-minute audit. We'll capture your real numbers today — and show you exactly what a rebuild would change.