3× faster on mobile, built to modern standards

The old ashcrofthomes.co.nz no longer matched the quality of the homes it was selling. It was slow — especially on phones, where key content took the better part of seven seconds to appear — and it fell short of the modern standards Google rewards, scoring just 50 for Best Practices and sitting mid-pack on Performance and SEO. For a premium builder, the site was quietly working against first impressions.

We rebuilt the site from the ground up on our Foundation approach — clean, standards-compliant code with no outdated libraries or insecure mixed content. Under the hood: automatic WebP image conversion (cutting image payload 30–50% with no visible quality loss), the brand’s variable font served as WOFF2 with non-blocking loading, minified CSS and JavaScript, and every asset delivered over HTTP/2 for faster parallel loading. Accessibility was rebuilt in with semantic HTML, stronger colour contrast and ARIA labels throughout.

Every measure jumped. Best Practices doubled from 50 to a perfect 100 on both desktop and mobile — the site now meets every modern standard Google checks. Mobile Speed Index fell from 6.8s to 2.1s, so customers on phones see content more than three times faster. Desktop Performance rose from 83 to 97, SEO from 77 to 85, and Accessibility climbed into the 80s on every device. Desktop Largest Contentful Paint halved (2.6s → 1.3s) and mobile blocking time dropped to zero.