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.
- 97Performance
from 64 · +33 pts
Google score, /100
Performance
Google's overall grade for how fast the page feels to load.
Anything 90+ counts as fast — 97 sits near the ceiling Google awards real-world sites.
- 2.5sLargest Contentful Paint
from 21s · 8.4× faster
time to main content
Largest Contentful Paint
How long before the main image or headline actually appears.
Google's bar for “good” is 2.5s. At 21s, most visitors were long gone before anything showed.
- 1.1sSpeed Index
from 7.9s · 7.2× faster
how fast it looks done
Speed Index
How quickly the page looks finished as it paints in.
Under 3.4s is “good”; at 1.1s the page reads as instant.
- 96Accessibility
from 81 · +15 pts
Google score, /100
Accessibility
How well the page works with a keyboard and a screen reader.
96/100 means contrast, labels and focus order hold up for real users — not just most of them.
- 92SEO
from 85 · +7 pts
Google score, /100
SEO
How cleanly the page is structured for search engines to read.
A clear page structure and the behind-the-scenes details — the groundwork that lets Google find and rank it.
Measured with Google's performance tools, 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 Google performance score: the main content paints in 2.5s on mobile, down from 21s
- Set up so search engines can read it: a clear page structure and the behind-the-scenes files Google looks for
- 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
Start a project
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