Field notes · 16 August 2026
What a rebuild actually changes.
A roofing company in the Tri-Cities came off a rented page builder and onto a stack they own. This is the whole job with the numbers attached: what we found, what we changed, what it scores now, and the part of the work nobody puts in a quote.
The starting point
A site that was quietly leaking
Palisade Roofing was not in trouble. They hold a 5.0 rating across 113 Google reviews, and they were at 100 when we started. Review capture is one of the systems we built into the stack. What they had was a website working against them: a page builder that was slow on the phones their customers actually use, thin structure underneath, and an inquiry process that depended on somebody noticing an email.
That combination does not announce itself. Nobody calls to say your site was too slow. The leak only shows up as jobs that quietly went to whoever loaded first.
Speed, measured
Every page, not the homepage
Most speed claims are about one page, usually the homepage, usually on a desktop. That is not where roofing customers are. They are on a phone, often standing in a driveway with one bar, looking at three contractors at once.
Chart: of 62 pages on the rebuilt site, 56 scored between 95 and 100 on mobile PageSpeed and 6 scored between 90 and 94. All 62 are above 90.
The rebuild is static, served from Cloudflare's edge, with no page builder runtime to boot before anything paints. The scores are a consequence of the architecture rather than a tuning exercise, which is why they hold across all sixty-two pages instead of just the one we would want to screenshot.
The rent
What the old stack cost to stand still
Chart: cumulative hosting cost over three years. A 55 dollar per month page builder reaches 1,980 dollars by year three. The rebuilt site stays at zero.
The monthly fee is the part people compare. The part they do not compare is what the fee buys: on a page builder it buys permission to keep using your own site, and the arrangement ends the day you stop paying. On the rebuilt stack the running cost is nothing, the code is theirs, and the domain was in their name the whole time.
Under the pages
The structure the old site did not have
Schema, sitewide
Every page carries structured data describing the business, the service, and the area it covers, so search engines and AI answers can read the facts instead of inferring them from marketing copy.
Measurement wired correctly
Analytics and Search Console connected properly, which sounds like table stakes and frequently is not. You cannot improve a funnel you cannot see, and a surprising number of sites are measuring nothing or measuring themselves.
Pages built around jobs
Structure that follows what people search for, service by service and area by area, instead of a menu that mirrors the company org chart.
The unglamorous part
The address change nobody quotes for
They moved. That sounds like an afternoon of admin and it is not: your address lives in dozens of places you did not put it, and search engines treat a business whose details disagree across the web as a business they are less sure about. A stale address on a directory you have never logged into is a small vote against you every time someone searches.
So we pushed the change across their online listings and made the site the consistent source it all points back to. There is no chart for this one. It is the least interesting work in the project and one of the highest-leverage, which is roughly the definition of the work agencies skip when a job is priced by the page.
After the click
The lead stack behind the site
A fast site that drops the lead is a fast site that drops the lead. The rebuild only pays if the ninety seconds after the form submit are handled.
The owner gets a text
A new inquiry texts him, immediately. Roofing is a speed-to-lead business: the contractor who answers first very often wins the job, and email does not get answered from a roof.
Customers book themselves
No phone tag to get an estimate on the calendar. The slot is picked by the person who wants it, at the hour they were thinking about it.
AI works every lead
Nothing sits unanswered because the week got busy. Every inquiry gets a response and a follow-up, which is the part that quietly decides whether a good month happens.
Scope
What a job like this costs
A rebuild at this size sits in our published range: site and section builds from $5,000, most landing between $5,000 and $20,000, quoted as a fixed number after a three business day Crux Roadmap that is refundable if you are not happy with it. Hosting afterwards is free. The reasoning behind those numbers is in what a custom business website actually costs, and the full picture for trades is on our home services page.
Worth saying plainly: not every business needs this. If your site is fast, your details are consistent everywhere, and somebody answers every inquiry inside an hour, you do not need us and we will tell you so on the call.
Want to know what yours is leaking?
A Crux Roadmap is three business days of real work on your site, search and systems, with findings and a fixed price at the end. Refundable in full if you are not happy with it.
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