Before and after
The makeover
Drag the handle or use the arrow keys to compare the old site with the new one.
The brief
Crown Tree Services are tree surgeons working across Norfolk. Their website had served them well for years, but it had grown slow and fiddly to update. A heavy theme loaded Bootstrap, jQuery, Font Awesome and a carousel plugin to show a single page.
They wanted the same site, done properly. The same logo, the same words and the same addresses their customers and Google already knew.
What we kept
- The one-page layout, so regular customers find everything where they left it.
- Every word of the services, gallery, testimonials and privacy policy.
- The animated tree logo. Its colours cycle through blue, lime, green and orange on a 17.6 second loop. The new banner, logo ring and footer fade through the same colours in step with it.
- All 31 addresses in the old sitemap. Service, gallery and testimonial pages kept their exact URLs. Leftover demo pages redirect to the homepage.
What changed
We rebuilt the site on a clean WordPress install with a theme written for this site alone. It has no framework, no jQuery and two self-hosted fonts. The homepage HTML went from 980 KB to 73 KB before a single image loads.
The colours now come from the logo itself, so the banner, services and footer share one palette.
Every piece of text is editable in WordPress. Services, gallery photos and testimonials each have their own screen with an icon picker and an order field. Phone, email, banner text and the homepage headings sit under Appearance › Customise. A box on the dashboard says where everything lives.
Under the bonnet
- A small must-use plugin switches off XML-RPC, blocks username discovery, hides the WordPress version and sends security headers.
- Theme and plugin editing in wp-admin is off.
- A short plugin list. Contact Form 7 with a honeypot for spam, The SEO Framework, an SMTP mailer so enquiries reach the inbox and a log that keeps a copy of every enquiry on the site.
Handing it over
The team received a 20-page guide with screenshots of their own admin screens. It covers changing text and photos, adding services and reviews, reading enquiries and sending email as the business address from Gmail.
Gallery
