Built for opening night, found from day one

Enis Baçova was opening Mulleti — a Roman forno in Ponsonby Central, pizza by weight in the “Nonna’s kitchen” tradition — and had weeks, not months, to get online. A new restaurant needs a site that looks the part on opening night, that locals can actually find when they search, and that doesn’t cost the earth or take a season to build. The brief was simple: live in time, fast, findable, and built to a standard we’d be happy to put our name to.

Built lean on Base89

Mulleti runs on Base89 — our own compiled framework, built for speed. We hand-build each site and compile it down to only the code the page actually uses, so nothing loads that isn’t needed. On Mulleti that means the entire front-end — all of its CSS and JavaScript — comes to around 10 kB. The page makes just 28 requests and loads in a little over half a second. The only real weight it carries is Google’s own analytics, the web fonts, and the food photography itself — the framework underneath is barely a footnote.

It’s built the modern WordPress way, too — assembled from native content blocks rather than a heavy third-party page-builder. Each section of the page is its own block, which is part of what keeps the code so lean, and it means the site stays easy to look after: copy, images and whole sections can be updated in the standard WordPress editor, without touching code or waiting on a developer.

Because the framework is lightweight and the structure is clean, everything that makes a site findable was built in from the start rather than bolted on later: proper page titles and meta, structured data, a sitemap, analytics, and self-hosted fonts. Fast to build didn’t mean cutting corners.

Built fast, and built right
We measure every site we build on our own Avo platform, and Mulleti scores where a modern site should. Google rates its performance 92 out of 100, with the main content painting in around three seconds and first paint under a second. Security is a perfect 100 — HTTPS enforced, and the full set of protective headers (content-security-policy, HSTS, and the rest) in place, so browsers treat the site as trustworthy and visitors’ data is protected. And its SEO foundation is flawless: a perfect 20/20, with a 98/100 page-quality score, so search engines — and AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews, all of which the site welcomes — can read and rank it without obstacle.

The site found its audience straight away. Within weeks of opening — on a business that had no online presence a month earlier — Mulleti already owns its name in search. Across Auckland it ranks #1–2 for “Mulleti” and “Mulleti Ponsonby”, and — a nice sign of real demand — it ranks first even for the common misspellings, so people who aren’t quite sure how it’s spelled still land in the right place.

And it’s starting to win the searches that bring in new custom, not just the brand ones. Mulleti is already surfacing for competitive local terms like “Ponsonby Central pizza” and “Italian restaurant Ponsonby” — early, but exactly the demand a new restaurant wants to capture.

What’s next

The foundation is strong; the next gains are in local and AI-search visibility. Adding a phone number and contact details to the site’s local business schema, building out its local presence, and gathering reviews will help Mulleti show up when nearby diners — and AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews — are asked to recommend a pizzeria in the area. That’s the Growth work that turns a strong launch into a steady stream of new customers.

You can see the finished site at mulleti.co.nz.