Case Study
Legacy Electrical CT
An emergency hosting rescue turned full rebuild — migrated off GoDaddy to Cloudflare Pages in a single day, then rebuilt from the ground up with Astro 6, hitting a perfect 100 mobile performance score and eliminating $550/year in hosting costs.
Tayler Nadolny-Sipes Berlin, CT
The Problem
Legacy Electrical CT had an established electrical business, a real client base, and a web presence that disappeared without warning. When their GoDaddy hosting contract expired, the site went offline overnight — no redirect, no notice, no fallback. Potential customers searching for a licensed electrician in Berlin found nothing.
The existing site wasn’t worth recovering. Built on plain HTML/CSS/Bootstrap with render-blocking fonts, no image optimization, zero structured data, and a desktop CLS of 0.578, it was technically broken even when it was live. The site couldn’t be found in local search, couldn’t establish trust on arrival, and couldn’t survive a hosting disruption.
The baseline told the full story:
| Metric | Mobile | Desktop |
|---|---|---|
| Performance Score | 76 | 77 |
| SEO Score | 75 | 75 |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 4.6s | 0.9s |
| First Contentful Paint | 2.9s | 0.6s |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0 | 0.578 |
| Structured Data Types | 0 | 0 |
Google Rich Results: 0 items detected
The Proof
PageSpeed Insights is Google’s own tool. These aren’t estimates — they’re the same signals Google’s crawlers use to evaluate and rank pages in search results.
Phase 2 Final — Astro Rebuild on Cloudflare Pages
| Metric | Mobile | Desktop |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 100 | 99 |
| Accessibility | 96 | 96 |
| Best Practices | 100 | 100 |
| SEO | 92 | 92 |
| LCP | 1.4s | 0.8s |
| FCP | 0.9s | 0.3s |
| CLS | 0 | 0 |
Google Rich Results: 2 valid items detected (LocalBusiness + Organization)
What those numbers mean in practice
100 mobile performance puts Legacy Electrical CT in a category that almost no contractor sites reach. Google’s Core Web Vitals directly influence local search ranking — a site that consistently hits green across all metrics will outrank a slower competitor over time, even one that’s been established longer.
Desktop CLS from 0.578 to 0 eliminates a critical UX failure. A layout shift score of 0.578 is classified as “Poor” by Google — it means the page was visually jumping as it loaded, causing users to tap the wrong thing or abandon the session entirely. Zero CLS means the page is stable from the first frame.
Structured data: 0 → 2 valid items means Google can now generate a verified business panel and surface Legacy Electrical CT in AI-powered search summaries. Without schema markup, that exposure simply wasn’t available.
$550/year in hosting savings means the rebuild pays for itself in reduced overhead before a single new customer calls.
Key Wins
- Mobile performance: 76 → 100
- Desktop performance: 77 → 99
- Desktop CLS: 0.578 → 0
- Mobile FCP: 2.9s → 0.9s
- Structured data: 0 → 2 valid items
- Hosting cost savings: $550/year
Pending — 30/60-Day GA4 Data
Search Console impressions, organic click-through rate, and lead form conversion data will be added here once a full month of post-launch traffic has accumulated. The technical foundation is in place — the organic growth story is already being written.
The Process
Phase 1 — Emergency Migration
The first call wasn’t about a redesign — it was about getting the site back online. Rather than restoring the old GoDaddy setup and returning to the same fragile infrastructure, we migrated to Cloudflare Pages the same day.
The existing codebase was connected to a private GitHub repository, a Cloudflare Pages build pipeline was configured, and DNS — already managed by Cloudflare — was pointed to the new deployment. SSL provisioned automatically. A corrupted GoDaddy-injected robots.txt was replaced with a clean, crawlable version that wouldn’t poison future indexing. Total time from outage to live: same day.
Moving off GoDaddy eliminated $550/year in hosting costs immediately. Cloudflare Pages runs free for static sites — the same infrastructure, zero ongoing cost.
Phase 2 — Full Astro Rebuild
Once the site was stable, the rebuild began. The goal wasn’t to recreate what existed — it was to build something that could actually compete in local search and represent the quality of the business behind it.
Stack and performance foundation. The site was rebuilt using Astro 6 and Tailwind CSS v4, deployed to Cloudflare’s global edge network. Astro ships zero JavaScript by default, which is why the performance ceiling is achievable at this level. Every tool was chosen to solve a specific performance or SEO problem — not to add complexity.
Image optimization. All 32 client photos were converted from HEIC/JPEG to WebP, resized to actual display dimensions, and given explicit width/height attributes to eliminate layout shift. The hero image — previously 441KB — was cropped to 1600×900 and compressed to 145KB. fetchpriority="high" was applied to attack LCP directly.
Typography. Fonts were self-hosted using Astro’s built-in font optimizer rather than loaded from Google’s CDN. This eliminated the render-blocking network request that was contributing to the slow FCP on the original site.
Structured data. Three JSON-LD schema types were implemented: Electrician, LocalBusiness, and OfferCatalog covering 13 individual services. Google went from zero structured understanding of the business to a complete, validated knowledge graph entry — enabling Rich Results eligibility that wasn’t possible before.
Analytics and search. Google Analytics 4 was configured with deferred loading to prevent render-blocking. Google Search Console was verified and the sitemap submitted. OG tags and Twitter Card meta were added to every page for consistent social sharing.
Lead capture. A Web3Forms contact form with success redirect replaces the old site’s broken or absent contact flow — giving potential customers a direct path to an estimate request without leaving the site.
Design Direction
The visual language was built to match the quality of the work Legacy Electrical actually does. Light mode, photography-led layouts, and a type pairing of Plus Jakarta Sans with Playfair Display create a premium contractor aesthetic — elevated without being generic. The black, yellow, and gray palette signals precision and reliability. Services are organized into four numbered categories with amber pill tags, making the offering immediately scannable without overwhelming a visitor who just needs a licensed electrician fast.