Their mobile site worked. It just took its time showing up, and the foundation thought the only fix was a full rebuild. It wasn’t.
The pain point
On a phone, the first couple of seconds matter most. That’s the stretch where the screen is blank and people decide whether to wait.
This foundation’s site was built with an older page builder tool. It worked, but on phones it took 2.9 seconds before anything appeared. Every visitor on a phone was rolling the dice on whether they’d wait that long.
Most agencies would have looked at that number and pitched a full rebuild. This client didn’t need one.
How we solved it
WordPress’s own block editor has grown up. It now does what the older builder tools were made for, with a lot less weight.
So we rebuilt the site’s theme on native WordPress blocks. Same content. Same look and feel. Different structure underneath.
That’s a tune-up, not a redesign. No design reviews. No content audit. No herding a committee through wireframes. Their team kept doing their work while we did ours.
They needed the engine replaced while the car stayed the same.
What it unlocked
On phones, the wait before anything appears dropped from 2.9 seconds to 1.8 seconds. The site also came out with a perfect 100 accessibility score on mobile, which matters to us on every build, whatever it does for the numbers.
Best of all, it came in at a third of what they’d budgeted for a full rebuild. That money went back where it belonged: their mission.
This was phase one. We’ll keep measuring, because that’s how we work on every project. Set a baseline. Make a change. Measure the result. Set a new goal.
If your site still runs on an older page builder, it’s worth finding out what a move to native WordPress blocks could do for your speed, and how much of a rebuild budget you might get to keep.