Wedding photographer website rebuilt: mobile score from 37 to 94

Adamo Morgese is a wedding photographer in Italy. He works in two regions, Sorrento/Amalfi Coast and Puglia. His clients are mostly couples from the UK and the US. His old website was built in WordPress with Elementor and Elementor Pro, ElementsKit, qTranslate-X (an outdated multilingual plugin), PixelYourSite, Site Kit, Smush and a number of other plugins. On mobile the Google PageSpeed score was between 15 and 52, 37 on average, and the largest contentful paint took between 4 and 17.5 seconds. The site showed only a spinner for the first 12 seconds or so, and content appeared around 16 seconds. It weighed about 3.0 MB across 131 files, and the server took about 844 ms to respond. At the same time the site held 859 old URLs, 400 old image URLs and 2.4 GB of private client galleries. All of it had to come across to the new site.

Desktop

Mobile

• A full backup of the old site and a measured baseline report before I touched anything, so before and after can be compared.
• A rebuild in WordPress with Etch (a visual builder) and a custom core plugin. The new site has 7 plugins in total.
• 24 pages around two regions, Sorrento/Amalfi Coast and Puglia: location pages (Sorrento, Positano, Ravello, Amalfi Coast, Puglia and Polignano a Mare), venue guides such as Villa Antiche Mura, Cloister of San Francesco and Villa Cimbrone, elopements, photoshoots and vow renewals.
• 301 redirects for 859 old URLs, all of which I checked. The 400 old image URLs are kept, and the 2.4 GB of private client galleries stay on the same links as before.
• The switch happened at night with a tested rollback script, so I could roll back if anything went wrong.
• A custom enquiry form that stores enquiries in WordPress and sends them by email. The spam protection is invisible (proof-of-work in the browser plus scoring), and real enquiries are never silently lost.
• A weekly and a monthly report email to the photographer with visitors, enquiries and Google Search numbers.
• A simple admin area: a cleaned-up menu, a dashboard with enquiries and an overview of this month, built-in guides and a login page in his own branding.
• Cookieless, privacy-friendly statistics (Independent Analytics) for all visitors. Google Analytics 4 and Meta Pixel only run after consent, through a cookie banner and Google Consent Mode v2. Clicks on enquiries and contact are measured.
• SEO foundation: competitor analysis of search results in the US and the UK, Search Console, rank tracking in the US and the UK, and Bing via IndexNow.
• A client portal with reports is being set up.

• The site went live on 12 October 2026 on the same SiteGround hosting as before.
• The mobile score in Google PageSpeed is 91–96, 94 on average, up from 37. On desktop it is 99–100, up from 61.
• Largest contentful paint on mobile is 2.7–3.3 seconds, down from 4–17.5. Cumulative layout shift (CLS) is 0.
• The page weighs about 0.4 MB across 14 files, down from about 3.0 MB and 131 files. The server responds in about 210 ms, down from about 844 ms.
• Nothing was lost in the move. All 859 redirects are checked, the 400 image URLs are kept, and the client galleries stay on the same links.
• The photographer gets reports on visitors, enquiries and Google Search by email every week and every month.
• I cannot show search results yet. Organic rankings take weeks to move, so they will follow later, and I will update this case when there are numbers.

• I measured the old site before I replaced it, so the numbers can be compared.
• I tested the rollback script before switching at night, so there was a way back if anything went wrong.
• The spam protection is built so that real enquiries are never silently lost.