Case study · Makyson Building Company · Custom homes, South Shore and Cape Cod
A custom home builder website, with six seconds of waiting cut by nearly half.
Makyson Building Company builds custom homes on the South Shore and Cape Cod. Their website is a portfolio: 135 photographs across seven builds, and those photographs were making people wait. We rebuilt the site, measured it before and after on the live address, and kept every picture.
The situation
A builder’s website is a portfolio with a phone number
Nobody hires a builder from a paragraph. They hire from photographs: the kitchen that looks like the one they want, the addition that matches their roofline, the finish work up close. Makyson had 135 of them across seven completed builds, two in Harwich Port and one each in Sandwich, Osterville, Canton, West Dennis and Forestdale. Every one earned its place, and none could be thrown away to make the site quicker.
The old site ran on WordPress with a page builder. It looked right and it was slow in the way page-builder sites are slow: not broken, just always a beat behind. So before touching anything we ran Google’s speed test as a phone on a slow connection and wrote the numbers down. Performance 67. The main photo on screen after 6.0 seconds. Just over a megabyte to download. Accessibility was already 95 and SEO already 100, which told us the previous build was competent and the problem was narrower than a rewrite.
Six seconds matters because of where the visitor is standing: in a half-finished kitchen with one bar of signal, showing their partner a builder they found. Six seconds is long enough to give up.
Diagnosis
Where the time was going
The big photo at the top was four times larger than any phone could show. A screen about 400 dots across was downloading a picture more than 1,000 dots wide, 185KB, and the phone waits for that one before the page looks finished.
The lettering came from Google’s servers. Every page opened by asking another company for the two typefaces and waiting for the answer before drawing a word. On office broadband nobody notices. On a phone at a job site it is most of a second of blank page.
Every photo was an old-format JPEG. The newer WebP format makes the same picture noticeably smaller, and every browser has understood it since 2020. The site was not using it anywhere.
Notice what is not on the list: WordPress itself. Page builders add weight, but the problems that measured here were delivery decisions that would have hurt on any platform.
What changed
Three fixes, in order of what they were worth
Photos now come in several sizes, and the phone takes the one that fits its screen: 40KB instead of 185KB for the top image, just as sharp, roughly a fifth of the download.
The lettering moved in-house. Both typefaces live on Makyson’s own site, and the two you see first are fetched straight away. No detour to another company, and nobody else is told who is visiting.
All 135 photographs became WebP, with the originals kept safely off the website so any picture can be remade later. Six of them, the ones that appear when a page is shared on Facebook or LinkedIn, kept an old-format copy too, because a share that shows a blank gray box costs more than the kilobytes it saves.
The result
67 to 84, on the live site
Measured the same way as the baseline, against the live site, as a phone on a slow connection.
Measured with Lighthouse 13, the speed test built into Google Chrome, set to imitate a mid-range phone on a slow connection, against makysonbldg.com before and after the work on August 19, 2026. Run it yourself; the score wanders a few points between runs, as it always does, but the gap does not.
The number a visitor feels is when the page looks finished. That went from 6.0 seconds to 3.4 seconds. First paint went from 2.8 seconds to 1.9. Page weight came down from 1,088KB to 938KB, which sounds modest until you remember the photographs did not get smaller on screen, only in transit.
| Category | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 67 | 84 |
| Accessibility | 95 | 95 |
| Best Practices | 77 | 100 (see note) |
| SEO | 100 | 100 |
* Best Practices is 100 for everything Makyson’s site itself contains. Run Google’s test on the live address and you will see a lower number, and the entire gap is one 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 it. Nothing Makyson wrote, nothing they can change. We show the score for the site itself and tell you why the live one differs.
Accessibility held at 95 and SEO stayed at 100. Nothing was traded away to buy the speed.
The unglamorous part
What we did not fix
Layout shift is unchanged at 0.153, above the 0.1 that counts as good, and it is the one number we set out to improve and did not. For a fraction of a second the big heading appears in a stand-in typeface, then the real one arrives and the words change shape, which nudges everything below. The usual fix is a stand-in that takes up exactly the same room. We tried it, measured it, and it made things worse, so we took it straight back out.
On an ordinary connection this measures zero; it only shows under the deliberately bad conditions the test imitates. We would rather write that down than quietly leave it out. A case study where everything improved is a case study where somebody stopped measuring.
The part most vendors skip
Max owns all of it
The contact form posts to an account in Max Oliveira’s name, not ours. If Makyson and Knowledge Designs parted company tomorrow, the inquiries would keep arriving in his inbox and nothing would need handing over, because nothing is being held. The site itself is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no database and no framework, which any competent developer can open and understand.
Every site we build works this way under the hood: our own code, written in-house, deployed as plain files, never assembled on a rented website-builder platform that can change its prices or disappear. How the build is paid for varies by client; Max bought his outright, and others prefer a flat monthly plan that includes the site, hosting and upkeep. What never changes is that your domain and your accounts stay in your name. That is the reason our guide to switching providers exists: a supplier who holds your domain, your forms or your hosting logins has a commercial interest in you not leaving.
If you run a contracting business
What this means for your website
Get a baseline before anyone touches anything. Lighthouse is free and built into Chrome. Run it on your own site, on mobile, and write the number down. Any web company that proposes work without one is asking you to take improvement on faith.
Your photographs are almost certainly the problem. For a contractor they nearly always are. Ask whoever runs your site whether images are served at the size they are displayed. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
Fast is not a vanity metric for a trade. Your visitor is outdoors, on a phone, on a bad connection, comparing you against two other builders. Loading is the first thing you do for them, and they judge it.
If you want the same treatment, our web design and development work starts by measuring what you have. We will tell you honestly if your current site is fine.
Common questions
No. All three fixes are about how the pictures and the lettering are delivered, and all three can be done on WordPress. We prefer plain static sites because there is less to break and nothing to keep patching, but the gains here did not come from the software underneath.
Not if it is done properly. The photographs on Makyson’s site look the same. What changed is that a phone is no longer sent a picture four times larger than its own screen can show.
Open your site in Chrome, press F12, choose the Lighthouse tab, pick Mobile and Performance, and run it. Note the score and the largest contentful paint figure. Under 2.5 seconds is good; over 4 seconds needs work. You do not need anyone’s permission to do this.
It is one signal among many, and a modest one. The real reason to be fast is that people leave slow sites, and a visitor who leaves cannot become a customer no matter where you rank.
Because Max asked to be. We keep client names off this website by default, for security reasons explained on our about page. The exception is the client’s to make, never ours.
Want to know what your site scores?
We will measure it, tell you what is costing you time, and be straight about whether it is worth fixing. No charge for the answer.