Case study · Reticulation & irrigation
A five-star business on a one-star website. We rebuilt it WordPress → Next.js and the numbers moved everywhere.
Perth, WAWebsite rebuild, performance & conversionLive · ongoing
The situation
This is a genuinely good local business — 230 reviews at 4.7 stars, the kind of reputation most trades would kill for. Its website didn't show it. The old WordPress site scored 40/100 on Google's performance audit on desktop and failed Core Web Vitals: the main content took five seconds to paint, the page jumped around as it loaded (a 0.40 layout-shift score, where anything over 0.1 is “poor”), and accessibility sat at 72. On mobile — where most “retic repair near me” searches actually happen — it was no better. Organic traffic had been drifting down for two years with no active marketing behind it.
What was at stake
Local-service buying is a mobile, high-intent, low-patience game. Someone with a burst sprinkler isn't waiting five seconds for your page to load — they're back on Google tapping the next result. A five-star business was being introduced by a one-star website, and every slow mobile load was a call going to a competitor. Reputation was carrying the business despite the site, not because of it.
What we did
Moved the site off WordPress onto a Next.js build served from the edge (Cloudflare), so pages render fast and consistently instead of waiting on a chain of plugins. Images were converted to modern AVIF, and the homepage hero — the single element holding back the mobile load — got a targeted one-format preload fix that pulled the largest paint down without the double-download trap.
Accessibility went from 72 to a perfect 100, best-practices from 46 to 92, and cumulative layout shift to zero — the page now loads locked in place instead of reflowing under the user's thumb.
The old site's review schema claimed a perfect 5.0 from 200 reviews — numbers that weren't real. We replaced it with the owner-verified 4.7 from 230 and wired it to refresh from Google automatically. We also captured a clean analytics baseline before changing anything, so every future gain is provable rather than asserted.
Every money page was rebuilt around what a high-intent buyer actually needs to see, with the enquiry path lifted out of the hero (which was dragging load and attention). Early data shows the conversion layer carrying the site through a seasonal traffic trough.
The proof
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance — desktop | 40 | 97 | +57 |
| Performance — mobile | 79 | 93 | +14 |
| Largest Contentful Paint — desktop | 5.0s | 1.2s | −3.8s |
| Largest Contentful Paint — mobile | 4.2s | 3.2s | −1.0s |
| Accessibility | 72 | 100 | +28 |
| Best Practices | 46 | 92 | +46 |
| Cumulative Layout Shift — desktop | 0.40 | 0 | eliminated |
| Speed Index — desktop | 4.2s | 0.6s | −3.6s |
Before = the live WordPress site (captured pre-cutover). After = the live Next.js site, Google PageSpeed Insights.
The result
The site is live and measurably fast — top-of-class on desktop and a mobile experience that no longer loses people at the door. The business outcomes are now being tracked against a baseline we captured before launch. The early signal, through a seasonal low: enquiries up 27% year-on-year on 39% fewer sessions, with the enquiry conversion rate running at roughly 2.1× the prior year (10.1% vs 4.8%) — more leads on far less traffic. The rebuild is the foundation; the SEO and lead programme running on top of it is the next chapter.
+27%
Enquiries YoY
through a seasonal trough, on −39% sessions
10.1%
Enquiry conversion rate
up from 4.8%
4.7★ / 230
Real review schema
auto-refreshed from Google
What this means for you
If your site is on ageing WordPress, this is the gap between what your reputation deserves and what your visitors actually get. A rebuild like this isn't a redesign for the sake of it — it's the difference between a mobile visitor calling you and bouncing to the next result. We do it as a fixed, evidence-led process, and we capture the “before” so the “after” is provable.
Book a 30-minute audit and we'll show you your numbers — performance, conversion and where the leaks are.