Our website went from 12 seconds to under 1. Here’s what we learned (and nothing we did was fancy).
A few months ago our site was taking up to 12 seconds to load. For a company that helps small businesses get found online, that’s not a great look. The design behind those 12 seconds had aged out too: graphics that belonged to a different decade, stock photos of people who have never set foot in Saskatchewan, and pages that looked like they’d been built by three different companies on three different days. In fairness, they had been.
So we did two jobs at once. We rebuilt the design and we rebuilt the speed. Here’s what actually happened, in plain English.
We had to reinvent what the website was for
Most redesigns start with “what should it look like.” We started with “what should it do.” That’s a harder conversation than picking a font.
We build websites all day, every day, for service businesses from Regina to Prince Albert, so our own site was never just a brochure. It had to prove we know how to develop websites, and it had to look good while doing it. If our homepage looked tired and loaded slowly, every claim further down the page was asking a customer to take our word for it. We would rather show the work than describe it.
That’s the uncomfortable part of a redesign: you have to prove yourself. Not with a clever tagline, but with a homepage that looks like it was made this year, on a site that opens before a visitor’s thumb finishes moving.
Redesign the system before you redecorate the pages
It’s tempting to open the homepage and start moving boxes around. We didn’t. We spent the first stretch defining typography, colours and the shared CSS, long before anything looked like a website.
That meant picking a type scale and actually sticking to it, so an H2 on a service page carries the same weight as an H2 on a blog post. It meant locking a palette to the brand colours instead of letting each page drift toward whatever looked fine that afternoon. Once those decisions were made in one place, every page inherited them automatically.
The payoff is boring and enormous: when a page gets added six months from now, it already looks like it belongs.
Outdated graphics and stock photos were quietly costing us credibility
Stock imagery is the fastest way to look like every other agency in the province. A smiling model in a hard hat standing in a stock photo studio in another country doesn’t tell a contractor in Moose Jaw anything true.
We replaced the generic pictures with real work, real screenshots and real people. The difference in how the site reads is bigger than the difference in how it looks. A visitor can tell within a second whether the business in front of them has actually done the work or is just describing it.
That’s also why the before and after comparison matters more than any paragraph we could write. See the screenshots below: same company, same services, two very different first impressions.
We go deep on how the build itself works on our Website in a Week page, so here it is embedded rather than described twice:
Website in a Week — A hand-built, Google-loving website that makes the phone ring and the till ding. Designed, written and launched in one week flat. You bring the vision; we do the heavy lifting.
abovethefold.live/website-in-a-week
The "Ew'.
The "Woo-Hoo!"
The site had become bloated, so we decided which pages to keep
This was the least glamorous meeting of the whole project. We listed every page and asked one question about each: does this earn its place?
Several didn’t. Pages built for an old service we no longer offer. Pages that repeated a page we already had. Pages nobody had linked to since 2019. Deleting them felt like throwing away work, and it was also the single most useful thing we did. Fewer pages to maintain, fewer pages to keep on brand, fewer pages to load.
Non-cohesive pages were the real problem
The old site didn’t fail because any one page was ugly. It failed because the pages didn’t flow together. You’d land on a service page in one visual language, click through to a contact page in another, and quietly lose confidence somewhere in between.
Now a visitor can move from the homepage to local SEO to pricing without the brand shifting under them. Same fonts, same colours, same tone, same button style. Cohesion is not decoration. It’s what makes a site feel like one competent business instead of a collection of experiments.
Clear calls to action, and claims with receipts
We cut the number of things a visitor could click and made the remaining ones obvious. One primary action per section, written in a human voice, sitting where a decision actually gets made.
We also stopped making claims we couldn’t back up. Where the site says local businesses get found, it now shows real client work. Where it talks about experience, it shows the numbers: 287 happy owners, a 5.0 Google rating, 25 plus years serving local business, one of Saskatchewan’s first Google-approved agencies. Those aren’t decorations either. They’re the difference between a promise and a receipt. If you want the same treatment for your own reviews, our SEO cheat sheet is a good place to start.
Speed problems are usually clutter, not one big bug
Now the technical half. We didn’t find a villain. We found fifteen little things: two Google tools still loading years after Google shut them down, a shopping-cart plugin on a site that doesn’t sell anything, a contact-form plugin loading a large security file on every page even though we’d stopped using the forms. Each one was only a second. Together they were the whole 12.
Delete before you optimize
Our biggest wins weren’t clever. They were removals. None of it was working. It was just loading.
Measure what the visitor feels, not what the score says
Our first round of fixes looked great in the test tools and felt worse to real people. One setting made the page appear instantly, then froze it the moment you scrolled. Lab scores went up. Humans had a worse day. We only caught it by loading the site the way a customer would and watching.
Your fonts should live in your own house
A performance setting had quietly deleted our brand fonts for weeks. Every headline was showing up in the wrong typeface and nobody noticed. That’s how brand drift happens, one helpful setting at a time. Now the fonts load from our own site: faster, and never missing.
One tracking system, not four
We had four overlapping snippets of Google, Meta and LinkedIn code scattered through the site. Consolidating them into one place was like finding four thermostats in one room and keeping one.
Meta titles and descriptions can have a personality
The last content job was the least visible and one of the most useful. We rewrote every meta title and description so they’re cheeky instead of boring, and we kept the on-page copy just as lively. A search result is a first impression, and “Saskatchewan Digital Marketing Agency” tells a buyer nothing except that we own a thesaurus. Say something. Make someone smile. Then make the click worth it.
We applied the same standard to the copy on every page. If a sentence could appear on any competitor’s site in Saskatoon or Swift Current, it got rewritten or cut.
The right small tool beats the big expensive one
First instinct was to buy Cloudflare or a premium speed plugin. Neither would have helped: the server was never the problem. A 25 dollar tool that let us switch off scripts page by page did more than any big subscription would have. A hairline white stripe also ran down both sides of every page. Nobody could name it, but it made the site feel off. One line of code fixed it. The last five pixels matter, because visitors can’t articulate what’s wrong, they just leave.
The results
- Time for the server to respond: 4 seconds to 0.13 seconds
- Full page load: 8 to 12 seconds down to under 1 second
- Files loading on the homepage: 41 down to 8
- Fonts: sometimes missing to always right
The same week, the same brand went onto a business card and two seven-foot trade-show banners, rebuilt for each size instead of stretched. That’s what a real design system buys you, whether you’re a two-person shop in Humboldt or a clinic in Yorkton.
The Takeaway?
Your website is like a garage. Nobody decides to fill it with junk. It just happens, one “I’ll deal with that later” at a time. Every year or so, open the door and look.
If your site feels slow or looks dated, don’t start by buying something. Start by asking what’s loading that shouldn’t be, and which pages don’t belong. If you’d rather hand the whole thing to a team that does it every week, our crew of designers, writers and SEO specialists covers local SEO, Google and social ads and AI automation alongside the build. You can read more about who we are, or book a call and we’ll tell you honestly whether a rebuild is the right move.
We proudly live and work in Saskatchewan, and we only work with local service businesses, because when local businesses win, the whole community does.
