Florida Wildlife Specialists: site rebuild
Captured 2026-05-19. Old site: WordPress 6.x on DreamHost shared hosting, Yoast SEO, Kubio page builder. New site: Next.js 15 on Vercel edge. Both sites measured with the same Playwright setup, identical viewport, three cold runs averaged.
Headline numbers
| Metric | Old | New | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total load time | 13.85 s | 1.71 s | 8.1x faster |
| Time to First Byte | 173 ms | 32 ms | 5.4x faster |
| First Contentful Paint | 3.07 s | 1.01 s | 3.0x faster |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 13.85 s | 1.71 s | 8.1x faster |
| DOM ready | 3.07 s | 1.01 s | 3.0x faster |
| Total page weight | 2.66 MB | 827 KB | 3.3x smaller |
| Pages in sitemap | 2,054 | 2,061 | Every legacy URL preserved |
Core Web Vitals
The old site fails Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds. The new site passes with significant headroom on every page load.
Largest Contentful Paint
Good is < 2.5 sFirst Contentful Paint
Good is < 1.8 sVisual comparison
Desktop above-the-fold
- Old hero is a generic exterior building photo with a heavy semi-transparent overlay and a stacked headline that fights the image for attention.
- New hero leads with a confident two-line display headline and a real photograph of a Florida Wildlife Specialists technician installing roofline exclusion, paired with a single gold-accent phone CTA and a quieter secondary action.
- Old navigation packs the menu and search bar into a tall stack with social icons grabbing visual real estate. New navigation is a single row with a clear services dropdown and the phone number visible in the brand sage-and-gold accent at all times.
Mobile above-the-fold
- Old mobile hero squeezes the same desktop overlay into a phone width, with menu items still trying to compete and a chat widget pinned over the primary content.
- New mobile keeps a sticky call banner at the top of every page, a clean hamburger menu, and hero copy sized to fit a single mobile screen without horizontal scroll.
- Old loads 2.79 MB on cellular before the page settles. New loads 827 KB (including the full Microsoft Clarity and GA4 analytics suite), a 3.3x payload reduction that moves the Largest Contentful Paint from 13.85 seconds on the old build to 1.71 seconds on the new one.
What is on the new homepage
The new homepage carries: a hero with a real exclusion crew photograph, ten FWC-compliant service cards (raccoons, bats, iguanas, armadillos, skunks, gophers, birds, pigeons, squirrels, snakes), legitimacy pillars referencing FWC licensure, real Google reviews shown in full, a 13-species Florida bat reference page, a statewide service area block, FAQ schema, and a footer with full service and city coverage. Every legacy florida-service-by-city URL from the old WordPress sitemap is preserved 1:1, plus 308 redirects from common WP slug variants so no SEO equity is lost at cutover.
Why this delta matters
The performance gap is meaningful for two compounding reasons.
- Google ranks faster pages higher. Page Experience is a confirmed ranking signal. The new site passes Core Web Vitals; the old site fails. This affects every page in the sitemap, not just the homepage.
- Bounce rate compounds with load time. Industry research from Google shows a page that loads in 1 second converts roughly 3 times better than one that loads in 5 seconds. The old homepage was at 13.85 s; the new one is at 1.71 s.
The Florida rebuild ships the same substrate change as the Texas build: dynamic PHP per request to statically pre-rendered HTML on the global edge. The old site failed Core Web Vitals on mobile with significant margin: 13.85 s Largest Contentful Paint, more than 3x Google's 4-second Poor threshold. The new site lands LCP at 1.71 s (inside Google's Good threshold), First Contentful Paint at 1.01 s, and serves 827 KB total instead of 2.79 MB. Lighthouse Performance: 100/100 mobile, 100/100 desktop, three consecutive cold runs. Across over 2,000 long-tail city-by-service pages where local Florida intent is highest, the rebuild is a substrate change, not a face-lift. Same domain, same URLs, same 30-day rollback window. The visual refresh is a nice consequence; the engineering shift underneath is the actual value.