Five Starr Staging & Redesign
A Tampa Bay home-staging company with a site that looked great and loaded slow. Here's what a custom-coded performance rebuild actually changed — with the receipts.
The problem
Home staging is a visual business, so the site was full of large photography — nearly 15 megabytes of it on every visit. On a phone, that means seconds of staring at a blank screen, and most visitors don't wait. Worse, hidden technical issues were quietly sabotaging its Google ranking.
What we did
- Rebuilt every image pipeline. All photography converted to modern WebP format with automatic fallbacks — full visual quality at a fraction of the size.
- Removed render-blocking weight. Styles pre-built instead of loaded from third-party servers, fonts self-hosted, and below-the-fold slides deferred until needed.
- Fixed a ranking-killer. The site's canonical URLs, sitemap, and robots file were pointing Google at a retired test address — telling search engines the real site was the wrong one. We corrected all of it.
- Tamed a heavy booking form. The third-party contact form loaded a dozen tracking cookies on page load. Now it loads only when a real visitor scrolls to it — keeping the lead pipeline intact while cutting the weight.
- Hardened the deploy. Security headers, correct favicons, and a clean publish pipeline from version control to global hosting.
The honest fine print: the mobile performance score sits at 75, not 90+ — because the owner loved the animated hero entrance and we kept it. Real engineering is knowing which trade-offs are worth it. The site's real-world payload dropped 93% either way.
The result
A site with the same look the owner chose, at one-fifteenth the weight: perfect 100/100 Google scores for SEO, accessibility, and best practices, an 89 desktop performance score, and a technical foundation that no longer works against its own ranking.