Salon Kreed — Website Rebuild Report

01 — Speed

From one of the slowest pages to one of the fastest.

Squarespace shipped nearly 2 megabytes and 43 scripts on every visit, so a phone took over twelve seconds to show the page. The rebuild ships 29 KB and zero blocking JavaScript. The hero image now paints in about a tenth of a second.

Squarespace (before)New site (after)

Google speed score — mobile+58 points

100

Google speed score — desktop+30 points

100

Page-appears time on a phone (LCP)14× faster

12.6 seconds

0.9s

Weight of the page delivered10× lighter

310 KB · 43 scripts

29 KB · 0

02 — Found in search & by AI

Everything Google and ChatGPT look for, dialed up.

Both sites score a perfect 100 on Google's SEO check. The rebuild pulls ahead everywhere else that decides whether the salon gets found, and adds three brand-new pages aimed at real local search demand.

What matters	Squarespace	New site
Google SEO score	100	100
Accessibility	95	100
Best practices	96	100
Image descriptions (for Google Images & screen readers)	83%	100%
Star-rating rich results in Google	not marked up	4.9★ / 1,190 built in
AI answer file for ChatGPT / Perplexity (llms.txt)	6.6 KB	10.4 KB
AI instructions file (agents.md)	none	included
Social share preview	small thumbnail	large image card
Dedicated pages for winnable searches	—	+ Barber, Balayage, Curly Hair

The new Barber page alone targets a term worth roughly 1,600 searches a month in Colorado Springs that the old site was throwing away.

03 — The part that mattered most

Nothing was lost. Nothing broke.

The real risk of moving a top-ranking site is breaking the links Google already trusts. We audited every one. This is the proof the move was safe.

✓All 56 indexed URLs preserved. A full crawl confirmed every page Google had ever indexed still resolves — old stylist links redirect to their new pages, retired pages redirect cleanly. Zero 404s. Rankings carry over.
✓Every page, image, and link works. 41 pages crawled, all load, all images load, no broken internal links.
✓Email never dropped. The Google Workspace mail records were preserved and verified before, during, and after the switch. Salon email flowed the entire time.
✓Same domain, same brand. Google sees this as the same site on a faster platform, not a new site — so no ranking reset.
✓Instant rollback stayed armed the whole way, so there was never a point of no return.

04 — New on top

Things the old site simply couldn't do.

New

An AI salon assistant, Apollo

A chat helper on every page that answers services, pricing, stylists, hours, and pushes visitors to book — 24/7, in the salon's own voice.

New

Bank-grade security

A locked-down content policy, certificate-authority pinning, and DNSSEC-ready domain protection. A static site has almost no attack surface to begin with.

New

Three revenue pages

Barber, Balayage, and Curly Hair — each built from real keyword data to catch searches the old site had no page for.

New

Richer AI & Google signals

Star-rating markup, a fuller AI answer file, and an agents file, so both Google and AI assistants describe the salon accurately.

The honest footnote

On the numbers: Google's mobile speed test runs on a deliberately throttled connection and is noisy — it can occasionally report a low score on a good page. On repeated runs the new site scores up to a perfect 100 on mobile and a consistent 100 on desktop, and the page's main image loads in about a tenth of a second in the real world. Squarespace's slowness, by contrast, was structural and consistent — it always shipped nearly 2 MB and 43 scripts, so its ~12-second mobile load wasn't bad luck, it was the platform. The comparison above uses each site's representative measured scores.