Case Study | Website Rebuild | Tampa, Florida
We Rebuilt Our Own Site. Here Is Every Number, Before and After.
I read a site the same way I used to read a construction site: what's actually there, not what someone hoped was there. I hadn't run our own site through PageSpeed until I started asking clients to run theirs. Once I did, I couldn't leave it alone.
What Was Wrong With Our Old Site?
Our old site ran on WordPress, a theme, a stack of plugins, structure I didn't fully control. It looked fine. PageSpeed Mobile Performance came back at 57. Largest Contentful Paint was 6.3 seconds. Cumulative Layout Shift sat at 0.263, meaning things visibly moved while the page loaded. GTmetrix graded the same site a C, 65%.
None of that would flag as broken to someone scrolling past. But I tell clients not to accept those numbers, and I wasn't going to run my own business on a standard I don't sell.
Why Rebuild in Full Code Instead of Patching the Old One?
A theme and a stack of plugins is convenient until it isn't. Each plugin is third-party code with its own release cycle, its own bugs, its own security exposure. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security 2025 report logged 7,966 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2024, about 22 a day, most of them in third-party plugins (Patchstack, State of WordPress Security 2025). Patching around that is a permanent job. Rebuilding without it removes the job.
So we rebuilt by hand, on Astro, hosted on Cloudflare, the same stack we build for clients. No theme layer, no plugins. Every element on the page is there because we put it there.
What Changed?
We ran the new build through Google PageSpeed Insights on both desktop and mobile.
| Metric | Old Site (Feb 2026) | New Site (Sept 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| PageSpeed Mobile Performance | 57 | 100 |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 6.3s | 1.1s |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.263 | 0.001 |
| Desktop: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO | not run | 100, 100, 100, 100 |
| Mobile: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO | 57, 94, 100, 100 | 100, 100, 100, 100 |
| Agentic Browsing | not a scored category | 3 of 3 (desktop and mobile) |
Agentic Browsing is PageSpeed's own check for whether an AI agent can navigate and read the page. It wasn't even a category when our old site was live. A 3 of 3 on both desktop and mobile now means the build is structured for AI retrieval, verified by Google's own tool, not something I'm telling you to take on faith.
Is This the Standard You Get?
Yes. This is the build standard on every active MDesign Studio Website Build, not something we reserved for ourselves.
If your site can't return numbers like these, that isn't cosmetic. Every search, human or AI, starts with your business a step behind a competitor whose site can.
Want to Know Where Your Site Actually Stands?
The free Business Visibility Check gives you an honest read on your current site: how it performs, how it's structured, and whether the systems people use to find businesses can actually read it. It costs nothing and takes about two minutes to request.