Case study, technical SEO
A tuning site fixed in place: mobile score 65 to 96, eleven seconds to 2.4, in one week
An established vehicle tuning business had a website built elsewhere on a page builder. Its home page took eleven seconds to become usable on a phone, a hero image the size of a short film loaded on every visit, six area pages were 72 per cent identical to each other, and half the site's pages had never been indexed. One week of work, no redesign and no new marketing copy, took the mobile performance score from 65 to 96 and the largest contentful paint from 11.0 to 2.4 seconds. Speed and duplication were measured directly on the live site afterwards, so they are facts. Rankings and enquiries are not on this page, because a week is not long enough to claim either.
Written by Daniel Stoychev, who did the work. Measured with PageSpeed Insights and our own duplication test after deployment. The client is not named.
Before and after
Four measurements, taken the same way both times
| Measurement | Before | After | How it was measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile performance score | 65 | 96 | PageSpeed Insights, mobile, on the live home page |
| Largest contentful paint on a phone | 11.0 seconds | 2.4 seconds | PageSpeed Insights, the same run |
| Text shared between the six area pages | 72% | 29% | Our own duplication test, the one we run on every site before deploy |
| Pages submitted for indexing | Half never indexed | 44 resubmitted | Search Console, sitemap and URL inspection; the resubmission is the action, not the outcome |
The page-builder runtime, the fonts and the images were the weight. The area pages were the duplication. The indexing problem followed from both: Google had crawled the pages, decided several said the same thing, and kept the ones it liked.
What was kept
The pages, the URLs and the copy that was already working
The owner liked the site and it looked fine. The instinct after an audit like this is to start again, and that is usually the expensive mistake: a rebuild changes URLs, loses the titles that had positions, and drops pages that had links because they looked old. So nothing was rebuilt from scratch. Every URL stayed. Every page with a top-twenty position kept its title. The service copy that was bringing enquiries was not touched.
What changed was underneath: how the images were served, how many scripts ran, where the fonts came from, and what the area pages said. That is the difference between technical SEO and a redesign, and it is why the work took a week rather than a quarter.
- Images
- Served in AVIF at the size the screen needed, instead of the original camera file on every visit. This was most of the eleven seconds.
- Scripts
- A dozen cut to the two that did something. The page-builder runtime was the largest single download and it drew nothing the visitor needed.
- Fonts
- Pulled from three places, now from one, loaded so that text shows before the font file arrives.
- Area pages
- Six pages rewritten so that each says something the others do not: the jobs done there, the roads, the specifics a local customer would recognise. Duplication from 72 to 29 per cent.
Why it matters
Speed is the one part of SEO you can verify the same day
A page that takes eleven seconds loses the visitor before it loads, whatever it ranks. Google measures the same thing through the Chrome data of real visitors, and a site with enough traffic sees it in Search Console's Core Web Vitals report. The pass mark we hold every site to is largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds on a phone and a performance score of 90 or more, and this site now clears both.
Duplication matters for a different reason. Six area pages that are 72 per cent identical are, to Google, one page and five copies, and the copies get filtered. Filtered pages do not rank anywhere. Rewriting them so each carries its own evidence is what makes an area page rank for its own town rather than compete with its neighbours.
Not claimed, and what transfers
The week is the fix; the months are the effect
This page does not claim a ranking change, more enquiries or more clicks. The resubmitted pages take weeks to be re-crawled and re-judged, and the area pages need time to be found for their towns. Those numbers belong in the monthly report, with their period, when they exist.
What transfers is the sequence: measure, fix the weight, fix the duplication, resubmit, then leave alone what was working. It is week one of the technical SEO service on every account with an existing site, and it is included in month one of every tier on the pricing page. The air-conditioning case shows the same week applied to an indexing problem rather than a speed one.
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