Vehicle customisation studio · Arizona
A site rebuilt from scratch, because the theme was the problem
A WordPress site on a heavyweight commercial theme, where every page carried a page builder it barely used. I rebuilt the whole thing by hand in Astro, and the site got faster, lighter and easier to keep current.
The situation
The site worked. It just carried a lot of weight it didn’t need: a commercial WordPress theme with a full page builder, a stack of plugins accumulated over years, and service pages edited so many times nobody could say what was still load-bearing.
None of that is unusual. It’s how most WordPress sites end up after a few years. The cost is that every visitor downloads the whole apparatus to read a page about ceramic coating, and every small change means fighting the builder.
What I did
- Rebuilt it in Astro, by hand. No theme, no page builder, no plugin stack. Pages ship as static HTML with only the JavaScript they need.
- Rewrote the service pages around the terms people actually search, not the phrasing the business used internally.
- Rebuilt the structure: clean URLs, proper metadata, and a sitemap that reflects the site as it is, not as it was three redesigns ago.
Search performance
A rebuild isn’t mainly a ranking exercise, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. But the search data did improve, steadily, and it has held.
Clicks per day from Google, by month
Averaged per day so partial months don’t distort the comparison.
Before the rebuildAfter the rebuildPartial month
Clicks per day went from 3.24 before the rebuild to 4.07 across April to August, up 26%. More usefully, the four most recent full months are the four strongest full months in the whole twelve-month record, so this isn’t one good spike doing the work.
What’s next
One page on this site outperforms all the others: a specialist service with its own page, ranking in the top ten and converting at more than ten times the rate of the general service pages. That’s the model. The remaining work is giving the other services the same treatment: specific pages for the specific things people search for, instead of broad pages competing against every studio in the state.
Search figures from Google Search Console, 12 months to August 2026. The rebuild launched in January 2026. Client anonymised. How technical SEO work is run ·More results
— Next step
Start with a free SEO audit
Send me your site and you’ll get a short, honest read on what’s wrong. If you want the detail after that, the full audit is a paid piece of work, or part of a retainer.
- 01The main things holding your site back, in plain English
- 02Which of them are worth fixing first
- 03Whether a full audit or a retainer makes sense, or neither