Case study 01
MJH Construction
A 30-year Eastern-Shore builder whose homepage took 21 seconds to load on a phone. We rebuilt it to paint in 2.5 — and to actually ask for the job.
- Sector
- Residential construction & siding
- Location
- Easton, Maryland
- Shipped
- 2026
- Scope
- Full rebuild
The site they came to us with
A good business behind a slow front door
MJH Construction is exactly the kind of business a good website should make shine: licensed since 1989, certified, insured, with thirty years of work across Maryland's Eastern Shore. Their old site didn't say any of that quickly enough to matter — on a phone, the main image took 21 seconds to appear. Most visitors are long gone before then.
The page was a heavyweight template carrying weight it didn't need: a giant logo watermark dropped over the hero photo, headline text overlapping the building behind it, a loud red “Creative Services” band, walls of testimonial copy, a third-party map embed and a newsletter sign-up — all competing for the same attention. Nowhere did one clear path say “get a quote.”
On a phone it didn't adapt cleanly: content ran past the edge of the screen, and a cookie banner sat on top of the only call to action. The overall impression was “generic contractor template,” when the business behind it is the trusted, three-decade local pro you'd hand your home to.
Scroll the capture → see the original site
The full original homepage — scroll inside the frame
Drag to compare
Same business. New first impression.
Left is the homepage they had. Right is the rebuild. Drag the handle — or tab to it and use the arrow keys.
← Before
After →
On the device that matters most
Most of their visitors are on a phone
On the old site the homepage ran past the edge of the screen and a cookie banner buried the call to action. The rebuild is mobile-first: one clear headline, the phone number a thumb-reach away, and the main image on screen in about two seconds instead of twenty-one.
Drag the handle on the phone →
The whole thing, side by side
Every section, rethought
Scroll each homepage end to end. Same business, same services — a clearer story and a single path to “get a quote.”
Before
After
What we measured
Real numbers, not adjectives
The same homepage, measured before and after. These are genuine readings — no invented stats, ever.
- 97
- Performance
- 2.5s
- Largest Contentful Paint
- 1.1s
- Speed Index
- 96
- Accessibility
- 92
- SEO
from 64 · +33 pts
Lighthouse, /100
from 21s · 8.4× faster
time to main content
from 7.9s · 7.2× faster
how fast it looks done
from 81 · +15 pts
Lighthouse, /100
from 85 · +7 pts
Lighthouse, /100
Measured with Google Lighthouse, mobile emulation, June 2026. Run it yourself against the original and the rebuild.
What shipped
Everything every Harbor Tree build includes
- A custom design built around one action — requesting a quote — not a theme with the logo swapped in
- A 97 Lighthouse performance score: the main content paints in 2.5s on mobile, down from 21s
- SEO foundations baked in: semantic structure, metadata, clean URLs and a sitemap
- A lead path measured in clicks — the phone number lives in the nav, the quote CTA repeats where decisions get made
- Accessibility lifted toward WCAG AA: contrast, keyboard order and screen-reader labels (96/100)
- Full ownership — domain, hosting, code and content, all in MJH's name from day one
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