Positive People: A website rebuild for an Auckland HR consultancy – 80% lighter and 3× faster on mobile

Positive People is an Auckland HR management consultancy with more than 30 years of experience. They work as a fractional HR partner for businesses of 20 to 200 staff, across HR outsourcing, employment relations, compliance and leadership development.

Their website ran on an off-the-shelf theme with the WPBakery page builder and a set of third-party plugins, each one more code to keep patched and another door for attackers to try. The homepage loaded nearly 50 separate scripts and 20 stylesheets, most of which it never used. On a phone it scored 59 out of 100 on Google’s speed test and took 6 seconds to show its main content, and some article pages took more than 12 seconds to show anything at all.

The site was around ten years old, and it looked and read like it. A large back catalogue of articles sat in one undifferentiated list. Simple updates meant working through the page builder. For a business whose whole offer is calm, practical expertise, the website wasn’t saying the right thing.

The site was also costing them money on Google Ads. Slow, dated landing pages drag down a key part of how Google ranks ads, so every campaign was paying more for less.

Started with their search data. Before designing anything, we dug into Positive People’s own Google Search Console and analytics data. It showed a business with genuine search presence: Positive People was already appearing in a large number of searches, and a few strong pages were bringing in most of their enquiries. The opportunity was conversion, turning more of those searches into visits and more of those visits into enquiries. The data told us which pages to build on, which searches they were close to winning, and where new content could open up more.

Studied the competition. Using Cardo., our own AI data-intelligence platform, we analysed which HR consultancies and employment-advice sites were ranking for the searches Positive People’s clients make, where they ranked, and what they covered that Positive People didn’t. Cardo. pulled their search data and the competitor data together into one gap analysis, showing exactly where competitors were winning traffic and where gains were there to be made.

Turned it into a plan. Together this became a digital growth strategy: a new page structure, a researched focus keyphrase for every page, and a content plan built around the gaps. It shaped every service page on the new site.

Designed around their people. We started with wireframes, mapping the structure of every key page around how Positive People’s clients look for help, then designed a fresh look that brings their brand to life: warm, people-first and plain-spoken. The Positive People team was part of the process from the first sketch, so the finished site feels unmistakably like them.

Built it on Base89. The new site is a custom theme on Base89, our own WordPress framework built for faster, more secure websites. There’s no page builder.

An editor that’s easy and fast. Instead of a page builder, the site uses WordPress’s own block editor (Gutenberg), with a set of custom blocks we built for Positive People: page heroes, services, testimonials, case studies, FAQs, insights and calls to action. Each block is designed and optimised once, so it loads only the code it needs and always looks on-brand. The team just picks a block, fills in the words and images, and drags it into place. Updating a page is quick and hard to get wrong, with no developer needed and none of the bloat a page builder adds.

Kept it lean. The new homepage loads 5 scripts (including Google’s tracking) and 2 stylesheets, against 49 and 20 before, and on a phone it’s 80% lighter to download. The code is compiled down to only what each page uses, and images and fonts are optimised and self-hosted.

Fast without the shortcuts. Many developers chase speed scores by bolting on caching plugins that store pre-built copies of each page, which hides a slow site rather than fixing it. Caching layers can also serve visitors out-of-date content, clash with forms and logins, and add one more plugin to keep patched. We don’t use them. The new site has no caching plugin and no page cache. It scores a perfect 100 for speed on desktop and 93 on mobile because the site itself is lean, so it stays fast for every visitor, on every page, every time.

Rewrote the content for search. Most of the old service pages were thin, around 150 to 330 words, too short to rank or to answer a client’s questions properly. Working from that plan, we rewrote every key page and created new content to fill the gaps. Each page is built around one researched search phrase, at a length that properly covers the topic: typically 500 words and up, with clear headings, plain-English answers and FAQs. Each page has its own focus keyphrase, SEO title and meta description, and we worked every key page up to Yoast’s green rating, the benchmark for a well-optimised page. Every article was sorted into proper categories, given new meta descriptions, and credited to named consultants with author bios.

Set it up for AI search. More and more people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews instead of scrolling search results. AI assistants favour sites that are easy to read, clearly structured and obviously trustworthy, so we built that in:

• An llms.txt guide, a plain-language summary of who Positive People are and what each service page covers, written for AI tools, plus a full-content version they can read in one pass.
• Structured data describing the business, each article and its author, so search engines and AI tools know exactly what they’re looking at and who wrote it.
• Open to AI crawlers. The site lets the major AI assistants read it rather than blocking them.
• Trust signals. Named authors with bios, an editorial policy, real testimonials and case studies, all signals that help AI tools decide a source is credible enough to quote.
• Answer-shaped content. Clear questions and direct answers, including a dedicated FAQ page, which is the format AI assistants most often lift from.

Built to lift Ad Rank. The same speed work is what Google Ads rewards. Every service page on the new site is a strong landing page in its own right: fast on mobile, focused on one service with clear keywords, and with an enquiry form a tap away. That means each campaign can send people to the page that matches the ad, not the homepage, which lifts landing page experience and ad relevance together.

Made it secure by design. Security on WordPress mostly comes down to what you leave exposed, so we designed it in from the start:

• Fewer moving parts. Features the old site got from plugins and the page builder are now built into the theme, so far less third-party code needs patching. No plugin scripts or stylesheets load on the public pages at all.
• Nothing to fish for. Login usernames are hidden from author pages and the public user list, so attackers can’t harvest account names to guess passwords against. The old XML-RPC login route is switched off.
• Hardened server settings. A full set of protective security headers (HTTPS-only, a content security policy, framing protection, content-type and referrer controls) is set at the server, and hidden system files and configuration are blocked from the web.
• A supported, patched stack. The site runs on a current, supported version of PHP, the language WordPress is built on, and we keep it updated. When a critical PHP flaw known as “php2shell” was disclosed in October 2026, the site was patched within hours of the fix being released.

Brought every article across, and organised it. We migrated every article into a new Insights hub with search, category filters and sharing. We reviewed the back catalogue with the client so outdated posts can be retired, and gave every page its own meta title, description and focus keyphrase.

Protected the search rankings. We mapped every URL on the old site to its new home and redirected each one. Articles moving under /insights/, services that were restructured and retired pages all point somewhere sensible, so nothing breaks and existing Google rankings carry over.

Positive People now has a modern WordPress website that’s fast and secure. It scores a perfect 20/20 on security in our site audit, loads no plugin scripts or stylesheets on its public pages, and sits on a supported, patched version of PHP.

Measured with the same Google Lighthouse test on the old homepage and the new, the homepage now fills a phone screen in 2.5 seconds instead of 8.4, more than three times faster, and the mobile speed score rose from 59 to 93. On desktop it scores a perfect 100 for speed, and accessibility, best practices and SEO all score 100 on both desktop and mobile. The homepage is 80% lighter on a phone, and it scores 100 in Lighthouse’s new agentic browsing check, up from 45, which measures how easily AI agents can find their way around a site. In our site audit, the SEO score has more than doubled, with more to come as Google indexes the new content structure.

Just as important for a small team: Positive People can now update their own website, from a new testimonial to a whole homepage section, without calling a developer or wrestling a page builder.

Every key page is now properly written for search, at a length that covers the topic, and the site is set up to be found and quoted by AI assistants as well as Google.

It also gives their Google Ads a much better foundation. Fast, focused landing pages are exactly what Google’s landing page experience rating rewards, so their campaigns can compete for better positions at a lower cost per click.

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