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Case study · Our own website · Measured

We rebuilt our own site 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 100 for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO on desktop, with 96 for performance on mobile. 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

knowledge-designs.com This site · desktop
  • 100Performance
  • 100Accessibility
  • 100Best practices
  • 100SEO

Core Web Vitals · field data pending

knowledge-designs.com This site · mobile, throttled
  • 96Performance
  • 100Accessibility
  • 100Best practices
  • 100SEO

Core Web Vitals · field data pending

Desktop is a clean sweep: first paint in half a second, zero blocking time. Mobile performance reads 96, and we know exactly where the missing points live. Most of them are the full-screen video at the top of our homepage. We could trade the video for a perfect row of hundreds. We like the video more. If that ever changes, this page changes.

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 PHP. 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, so loading this page contacts nobody else. There are no tracking cookies, which is why you never saw a cookie banner. 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

Somewhere around fifty-seven 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.

Fair questions

Built the same way, yes. These scores are not a tuning trick; they follow from what the page does not carry. And when your business genuinely needs WordPress, WooCommerce or Shopify, we will tell you so and build on those instead. About one project in ten lands there.

Yes, and you should. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste knowledge-designs.com, and wait about thirty seconds. Paste your current site while you are there. The comparison is the sales pitch, and we did not write it.

Rankings attach to addresses, so every old address we could find now answers with a 301 redirect pointing at its replacement, and we watch search data for stragglers. It is the same migration discipline we run on client rebuilds, because it is the part that decides whether rankings survive.

What does your site score?

Run your site at pagespeed.web.dev, then run ours. Thirty seconds each. If the gap bothers you, it is worth a conversation.