TruLight Austin: site rebuild
Captured 2026-05-06. Old site: Lovable.app template. 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 | 3.34 s | 712 ms | 4.7x faster |
| Time to First Byte | 639 ms | 37 ms | 17.3x faster |
| First Contentful Paint | 1.81 s | 469 ms | 3.9x faster |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 1.81 s | 524 ms | 3.5x faster |
| DOM ready | 1.61 s | 449 ms | 3.6x faster |
| Total page weight | 53.61 MB | 1.48 MB | 36.1x smaller |
| Pages in sitemap | 6 | 54 | 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 the same dark-navy Lovable template as the Salt Lake City build, with the city tag swapped: "Light Up Your Home with TruLight" above a gradient-orange "Permanent Lighting Austin, Texas" line. No real photograph of an actual installed job.
- New hero leads with a real photograph of a permanent-lighting installation on a Texas home at night, paired with the same customer-benefit headline as Salt Lake City ("Never Hang Holiday Lights Again.").
- Old page weighs 56 MB across 220 requests, the heaviest first-load in this gallery. New page weighs 1.56 MB across 53 requests, a 36x reduction in bytes shipped on every visit.
Mobile above-the-fold
- Old mobile carries the full 56 MB payload from desktop, with the chat widget pinned over the primary CTA above the fold.
- New mobile keeps the Free Quote CTA and Austin phone number in a sticky header, with the sub-headline visible above the chat widget.
- Old required cellular users to download 56 MB of dark-template assets before the page settled. New requires 1.56 MB, which moves the mobile hero to a sub-second settle on cellular.
What is on the new homepage
The new homepage carries: a hero with a real installed-job photograph from an Austin home, the same ten-service category set as the Salt Lake City build (permanent lighting, roofline, soffit and fascia, holiday lighting, accent, security, smart, music sync, residential, outdoor, commercial, free consultation), Texas service-area pages spanning Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown, Pflugerville, Cedar Park, Leander, and surrounding cities, real five-star Google reviews shown by name, pricing and financing pages, an FAQ, and a blog. The sitemap grew from 6 indexed pages on Lovable to 54 on Vercel, a 9x expansion of the SEO footprint at no added page-load cost.
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 3.34 s; the new one is at 712 ms.
Austin shows the same Lovable to Vercel substrate change as the Salt Lake City build, at the extreme end of the page-weight axis. The old template shipped 56 MB on every homepage visit, the heaviest first-load of any site in this gallery, driven by a hydrated template engine and chat widget bundled into a single client-rendered SPA. The new build is statically pre-rendered HTML on Vercel's global edge: 1.56 MB total, 53 requests, time to first byte at 37 ms. Page weight drops 36x. Total load drops 4.7x. First Contentful Paint moves from 1.81 s in Google's "needs improvement" band to 469 ms, passing with significant headroom across 54 pre-rendered pages.