Website conversion rate tripled from 1.1% to 3.4%

Cedar & Stone ranked well and got roughly 3,000 sessions a month. It converted about 33 of them into inquiries. The owner assumed she needed more traffic and had budgeted for it.

She did not need more traffic. She needed the traffic she already paid for to do something.

The site took 6.2 seconds to render on mobile, where 71% of her visitors were. Roughly a third of them left before seeing anything at all.

The visitors who stayed hit a homepage that led with a company history paragraph, buried the portfolio three clicks deep, and offered one contact path: a generic form at the bottom of a Contact page. For a business that sells on visual proof, the photography was the last thing anyone saw.

Rebuilt for speed first

Compressed and modernized the image pipeline, lazy-loaded everything below the fold, and stripped four unused third-party scripts. LCP went from 6.2 seconds to 1.4.

Led with the work

Full-bleed project galleries above the fold, organized by project type rather than by date, with budget ranges attached to each.

Gave people more than one way in

A design consultation request, a rough budget estimator, and a text option. Different buyers convert through different doors.

Wrote for the actual decision

Replaced the history paragraph with the three questions every homeowner asks before booking a landscape designer: what does it cost, how long does it take, what does the process look like.

Measured in GA4 and Search Console across matched 90-day windows before and after launch, with traffic held effectively flat.

• Conversion rate went from 1.1% to 3.4%.
• Design consultation requests rose 209%.
• Mobile LCP improved from 6.2 seconds to 1.4 seconds.

No new traffic was purchased during this window. The entire gain came from the existing audience.