~15s
Mobile load
Main content took roughly fifteen seconds on a throttled phone — well outside what Google considers acceptable.
Case Study · Website Rebuild & Migration 
A slow site, rebuilt fast — and a migration that never dropped a single email.
The Benefit Group is a boutique third-party administrator helping self-funded employers across the country manage claims, cost containment, and benefits administration with a genuinely hands-on touch. Their old WordPress site was slow, read local when the business is national, and had no real way to capture a lead. We rebuilt it from the ground up — then moved it without so much as a flicker on email or the member portal.
The problem
A dated build that undersold a premium firm.
The Benefit Group had outgrown its site. Built on WordPress and Elementor, it was slow on the devices that matter, framed the firm as a regional shop, and gave a prospective employer no reliable way to start a conversation. And the domain carried a web of business-critical DNS — company email, a member portal on a subdomain, and several third-party senders — that any migration had to preserve exactly.
Passive
Lead capture
No meaningful lead path — no reliable way for an inquiry to land in the right inbox.
Local
Positioning
The site read like a regional shop, when the business actually serves employers nationwide.
What we did
A faster site, a real lead engine, and a flawless cutover.
Rebuild it fast and maintainable, make it look worthy of the brand, turn every inquiry into an instant lead — and move the whole thing without losing email or the portal for a second.
01
A static-first, data-driven rebuild
We replaced the WordPress/Elementor build with a hand-coded, prerendered site served from a global edge network with near-zero JavaScript. Every brand fact — hours, services, team, portal links — lives in one structured source of truth, so a change updates the header, footer, contact page, and structured data together. Adding a service is a data edit, not a template rewrite.
02
A design worthy of the brand
We built the full site — home, services, about & team, resources, contact, article template, privacy, terms, and a custom 404 — around a tokenized design system: a warm editorial serif paired with a clean sans, self-hosted for privacy and speed, over a navy-and-gold palette that reads established and trustworthy without feeling stuffy.
03
A lead engine that actually works
Every form fill fires an instant, formatted notification to the team and sends the prospect a branded auto-reply confirming their message is on its way. Honeypot spam protection, inline validation, and a GA4 generate_lead conversion event are all baked in. Mail is sent through the client’s authenticated domain, so it lands in inboxes — not spam.
04
Performance engineered in, not bolted on
Speed was a design constraint at every step: static prerendering served from the edge, responsive next-gen images (AVIF/WebP) with the hero prioritized for LCP and everything below the fold lazy-loaded, and hard asset discipline — we caught brand logos exported at 3500×3500px serving into a 76px slot and cut hundreds of kilobytes off the mobile critical path.
05
Nationwide SEO, without losing the hometown
Unique titles and meta on every page, canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter cards, and a full JSON-LD schema graph (Organization, Website, FAQ), plus sitemap, robots, and analytics. Nationwide positioning is woven through the copy, metadata, and schema — while keeping the authentic Omaha headquarters intact. Semantic markup, descriptive alt text, and strong contrast throughout.
06
A sign-off tool that made review painless
To make approvals fast, we built a temporary interactive copy-review page — the old copy and the new copy side by side, with inline note boxes so the client could request changes in context and submit them in one click. A normally tedious review cycle became a few minutes of clicking.
07
A migration that broke nothing
The domain did far more than serve web pages, so we built a record-by-record migration runbook. Of roughly 36 DNS records — Microsoft 365 mail (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC), the member-portal subdomain, transactional-email authentication, and several third-party senders — only two changed (the website itself). Every legacy URL was mapped with 301s, the real privacy policy was ported out of a stray PDF into a proper page, and the whole cutover was verified end-to-end. Email and the member portal never went down.
Static-firstEdge-hostedHand-codedSingle source of truthAutomated lead pipelineFull schema graphNationwide SEOZero-downtime DNS migration
The results
Faster on every metric. Every lead captured. Zero downtime.
Measured performance before and after, plus the one number a benefits administrator cares about most during a move — downtime.
57→83 Mobile performance — Lighthouse (+26)
88→99 Desktop performance — Lighthouse (+11)
Zero Email & portal downtime during the migration
15.4s→4.3s Mobile LCP, main content — 72% faster
6.3s→1.4s Mobile First Contentful Paint — 78% faster
7.9s→2.4s Mobile Speed Index — 70% faster
0.002→0 Mobile layout shift (CLS) — zero, no jump as it loads
1.8s→1.0s Desktop LCP — 44% faster
1.2s→0.4s Desktop First Contentful Paint — 67% faster
New site also scores
97–100Accessibility
100Best Practices
100SEO
Lighthouse and load figures are measured results for this project. We build every site to hit the high 90s — we don’t promise a perfect score on hardware and networks we don’t control.
Need a rebuild that can’t afford to break anything?
If your website shares a domain with your email, a portal, or anything else you can’t lose, the migration matters as much as the design. We plan it record by record and move it clean — then hand you a faster site that actually captures leads. Let’s talk.