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Case study · Our own website · Measured
We rebuilt our own WordPress site as a static website first.
Short answer: our old website ran WordPress and Elementor, the same stack we now help clients leave. In 2026 we rebuilt knowledge-designs.com as a static site. On Google’s own test it scores 99 for performance and 100 for accessibility and SEO on desktop, with 79 for performance on mobile. Best practices is 100 for the site itself; the live address reads 81 only because of a file Cloudflare adds in front of it, explained below. Every number on this page is public, and you can rerun any of it in about thirty seconds.
The “before” nobody screenshots
We would love to open with a dramatic before-and-after chart. We can’t, honestly. We never benchmarked the old site. It was ours, and the shop’s own website is always the last thing that gets attention.
Here is what we can say for certain. It ran WordPress with Elementor. Updates waited. Plugins waited. Changing anything was work, so most things went unchanged.
One detail makes the point better than any chart. Until this rebuild, Google’s index still held a page from our old template that introduced “Mark, a professional video editor.” Nobody here is named Mark. That sentence shipped with the page builder, and it sat on our own domain longer than we will admit, because editing the old site was a chore we kept putting off. That is what a page-builder site becomes when the people who run it are busy. Not broken. Just quietly stale, in public.
If you want a before-and-after that was measured properly, we published one from a client project: a real 32-page Elementor site, measured against its static rebuild on the same day. The short version from that page: 432KB of HTML down to 48KB, thirty-five script files down to one, ten plugins down to none.
Measured August 2026
What it scores now
- 99Performance
- 100Accessibility
- 100 (see note)Best practices
- 100SEO
Core Web Vitals · field data pending
- 79Performance
- 100Accessibility
- 100 (see note)Best practices
- 100SEO
Core Web Vitals · field data pending
Desktop is close to a clean sweep: first paint in half a second, 99 for performance. Mobile reads 79, and we know exactly where the missing points live. Nearly all of them are the full-screen video at the top of our homepage, which a phone on a throttled connection has to start downloading before the page counts as finished. We could trade the video for a perfect row of hundreds. We like the video more. If that ever changes, this page changes. That is what happened to the numbers above: the first version of this page said 100 across the board, and a re-test in August 2026 said otherwise. We updated it rather than argue with the test.
* Best practices is 100 for everything this site contains. If you test the live address yourself you will see 81, and the whole gap is one small file that Cloudflare, the anti-spam service in front of the site, adds to every page. The test flags an aging piece of code inside that file. Nothing we wrote, nothing we can change, and the same thing happens to every site behind the same protection. We show the site’s own score and tell you why the live one differs.
One badge above says “field data pending,” and it deserves a plain explanation. The scores here are lab tests, rerun on demand. Core Web Vitals is different: it is Google’s record of how a site behaved for real Chrome visitors over the past month, and a freshly relaunched site has not accumulated that history yet. We would rather show you a pending badge than a claim you cannot check.
What we built instead
Flat files, served fast. No database. No server code. No plugins. No admin login page. The attack that hits most small-business websites comes through one of those four doors, and none of the four exists here. That is not invincibility, because DNS, hosting and email still matter. It is a much shorter list of things that can go wrong.
The quieter details are the ones we care about most. Fonts are served from our own domain rather than fetched from Google, so your visit is not announced to a font CDN. The one outside service this page does talk to is Google Analytics, and we run it without cookies and with Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control honored, which is why you never saw a cookie banner: there is nothing to consent to. Every page carries structured data that machines read as easily as you read this sentence. And the addresses are clean, like /contact, with every old address we could find answering with a permanent redirect to its replacement.
Updating the site is now a file edit and a deploy that takes seconds. Nothing to patch on a schedule. Nothing that breaks because two plugins disagreed overnight. The maintenance this site will need in a year rounds to zero.
Why there are no client names here
More than sixty of the sites we have built are live on the internet right now. You will not find a wall of their logos on this website, and that is a decision, not an oversight.
A published portfolio is a prospecting list. Agencies scrape them and cold-pitch every business on the page. When you have built this many sites, a logo wall stops being marketing for you and starts being a map for everyone else. Our clients already field enough of those calls without us handing out directions.
There is a security side too. Knowing who runs which systems is exactly the kind of information an attacker starts with. We treat our client list with the same care we treat their passwords.
So the proof lives in two places that are harder to fake than a logo wall. The first is this website, which you are reading and can measure. The second is our Google reviews, every one of them five stars, written by people who chose to put their names to them in public. References are available on request, the old-fashioned way.