Texas Wildlife Specialists: site rebuild
Captured 2026-05-06. Old site: WordPress on shared hosting. 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 | 3.78 s | 487 ms | 7.8x faster |
| Time to First Byte | 208 ms | 58 ms | 3.6x faster |
| First Contentful Paint | 3.35 s | 409 ms | 8.2x faster |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 3.35 s | 413 ms | 8.1x faster |
| DOM ready | 3.52 s | 350 ms | 10.1x faster |
| Total page weight | 3.81 MB | 1.54 MB | 2.5x smaller |
| Pages in sitemap | 1,001 | 1,008 | 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 tinted overlay on a generic stock photo, with three small badges at the bottom that compete with the headline.
- New hero leads with a strong two-line display headline, a real bat-exclusion crew photo, and a single primary CTA paired with a quieter secondary action.
- Old navigation puts six menu items and social icons above the fold without hierarchy. New navigation is a single row with one phone CTA in the brand's gold accent.
Mobile above-the-fold
- Old hero squeezes the headline behind the navigation bar; readability suffers above the fold.
- New mobile keeps a single-line dropdown nav and a sticky phone CTA in the header at all times.
- Old has small social icons grabbing attention near the logo. New keeps the focus on the phone number and the CTA.
What is on the new homepage
The new homepage carries: a hero with a real crew photo, ten Texas-relevant service cards, a legitimacy section with TPWD licensure and bat-protection law context, real Google reviews, an 18-species bat reference page (Brazilian free-tailed bat correctly framed as the Texas state mammal with Bracken Cave and Congress Avenue Bridge context), a service area block, and FAQ schema. Every legacy city by service URL from the old WordPress sitemap is preserved, 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 3.78 s; the new one is at 487 ms.
The Texas rebuild ships the same substrate change as the Utah build: dynamic PHP per request to statically pre-rendered HTML on the global edge. Old site fails Google Core Web Vitals on every page load. New site passes with significant headroom across over 1,000 statically pre-rendered pages, the long tail where local Texas-city intent is highest.