Case study: a real hotel website rebuilt, from 39 to 99 on mobile

What the numbers were, and how to check them

Both were measured the same day on the same connection. Run them yourself: the live site on Google’s test and the rebuild on Google’s test. The scores move a few points between runs; the gap does not. Google’s threshold for a good score is 90 (web.dev), so the live site is 51 points below it and the rebuild is 9 above.

What the rebuild found

Speed was the reason for the rebuild. Reading the old site closely enough to rebuild it turned up five things that were costing the hotel more than a slow page does:

• Three guest testimonials whose body text was placeholder lorem ipsum, under invented names. A visitor who noticed would trust nothing else on the page.
• Leftover theme demo text on several pages, including a different hotel’s name.
• Three different phone numbers across the site. That is what fragments a business’s local search listing, because Google reads the contradictions and republishes them.
• A room count that disagreed with the hotel’s confirmed figure.
• Two spellings of the region and a misspelled page address.

None of these show up in a speed score. All of them were fixed in the rebuild, and every fact on the rebuilt site was confirmed by the hotel before it went on the page. That is the rule the pipeline works by: nothing is invented, and where the old site disagrees with itself, the owner decides.

What this means for your site

A business site that has been live for a few years is usually carrying the same kind of debt: a slow theme, photographs uploaded at full size, and text that was never read again after launch. The score is the symptom that shows up in the search results. The first fold is where a visitor decides, and it is the first thing to load or not.

The cost of fixing it is in what a small business website costs, and the ten lines to compare when you get more than one quote are in how to compare website quotes. The six weeks of work on the live site before this rebuild, and what its hosting stack did to every fix, is in the first case study. The first client site launched on the pipeline will be the third, with its numbers on the day of launch.

Questions people ask

Is the rebuilt hotel site live?

No, and this page says so on purpose. The rebuild lives at a preview address and the hotel's WordPress site is still the one on its domain, because the hotel is deciding on the switch. Both are linked here so the before and after can be tested side by side on the same day.

Why does the mobile score matter more than the desktop one?

Because that is where the customers are, and because it is the harder test. Google's mobile test throttles the connection and the processor to something like a mid-range phone on a cellular network. A site that scores 39 there is losing about half its visitors before the page appears, by Google's own abandonment research.

What did the rebuild not change?

The words, the photographs, the room types and the event spaces. A rebuild on the pipeline keeps the business's own content and fixes how it is delivered. Where the old site contradicted itself, the hotel confirmed the right figure and the rebuild used that.

How long did the rebuild take?

One pass of the pipeline from the existing content, plus the time to read the old site closely enough to find the problems below. The reading is the part that takes judgment; the building is the part the pipeline does.