Utah Wildlife Specialists: site rebuild
Captured 2026-05-06. Old site: WordPress on Apache. 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 | 3.73 s | 558 ms | 6.7x faster |
| Time to First Byte | 521 ms | 33 ms | 15.8x faster |
| First Contentful Paint | 3.17 s | 345 ms | 9.2x faster |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 3.47 s | 351 ms | 9.9x faster |
| DOM ready | 3.57 s | 210 ms | 17.0x faster |
| Total page weight | 4.74 MB | 2.17 MB | 2.2x smaller |
| Pages in sitemap | 1,000 | 1,281 | 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 leads with a stock aerial of cars. New leads with a real bat-exclusion crew photo.
- Old hero headline runs 9 words across a washed background. New runs a confident two-line display headline that fits cleanly.
- Old logo sits in dark navigation with eight wrapping menu items. New logo is seated in a brand-matched olive header with a single-row dropdown nav and a khaki phone CTA.
Mobile above-the-fold
- Old: top-left phone number, eight unstyled nav items wrapping awkwardly, dark hero on a busy background.
- New: olive header that matches the logo, single-line dropdown nav, prominent khaki call button.
- New hero copy fits comfortably on a single mobile screen without horizontal scroll.
What is on the new homepage
The new homepage carries: a hero with a real crew photo, ten service cards, four pillars on why Utah homeowners choose them, a real Google reviews rail (4.4 stars across 104 reviews, transcribed verbatim), a service area block, FAQ schema, and a footer with full service plus city coverage. Every legacy city by service URL from the old WordPress sitemap is preserved verbatim, 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 3.73 s; the new one is at 558 ms.
The performance gap is not a face-lift. It is a substrate change: dynamic PHP per request to statically pre-rendered HTML on a global edge cache. The bounce-rate compounding alone, applied across 1,281 long-tail pages where local intent is highest, justifies the rebuild before any visual or copy improvement gets credited.