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A Northern Beaches builder of bespoke homes needed their site to do justice to the work, and to keep performing long after launch. Two years on, it scores 90+ on PageSpeed, looks identical to The Design Order's vision, and hasn't missed a step.
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Peninsula Homes had outgrown their old website. It was dated, slow, and starting to hurt their search rankings. Their SEO consultant set a hard requirement: any rebuild had to score 75+ on Google PageSpeed, and stay there.
They'd hired The Design Order to refresh the brand and were choosing between three developers to build it. The design had to be matched faithfully. No compromises on detail. Whoever they picked also had to be someone they could trust to maintain the site for the long run.
Peninsula Homes came to us through The Design Order, who'd worked with us on three earlier projects. After a video call we got the nod. They said they felt most comfortable with how we'd handle the build and the long-term care.
We chose WordPress for content management, but with a RAVENCI-customised version of Zion Builder rather than the heavier Elementor or Divi alternatives. That single decision did most of the heavy lifting on performance: the finished site scored over 90 on PageSpeed, well clear of the 75 their SEO consultant required.
From there it was a careful pixel-for-pixel build of The Design Order's design, with the more interactive elements (featured projects, the menu, About-page lightboxes) custom-coded so the page weight stayed low and the performance budget intact.
The Design Order wanted the three most-recent blog articles on the home page with a distinctive hover interaction: the featured image and styling on the right swap as visitors move between articles. Rather than reach for a plugin, we built it as a single custom block so it loads instantly without dragging the page down.
Peninsula's most recent builds, surfaced at eye-level on the home page. Visitors get a sense of the range and quality of the work before they've scrolled. Custom-coded for performance, no off-the-shelf gallery plugin slowing things down.
Some pages needed slightly different navigation. Rather than maintain a separate menu for each, the menu reads the current page and adjusts itself automatically. One source of truth, zero per-page configuration to maintain.
The old site had small images and long copy that fought for attention. The new project pages flip that: large galleries lead, with carefully placed copy that supports rather than competes. Visitors leave with a clear sense of what Peninsula builds.
Custom lightbox interactions on the About page let visitors get a closer look at the team and the work without leaving the page. Subtle, fast, and built around the brand's quiet confidence. No off-the-shelf gallery plugin in sight.
The site launched in 2024 and has been running ever since: same shape, same speed, no degradation. PageSpeed Performance sits at 94, Best Practices at 96, First Contentful Paint at 0.4s and Largest Contentful Paint at 0.8s, well above the 75+ benchmark Peninsula's SEO consultant required, and the build remains identical to The Design Order's design.
Peninsula's team adds new projects and updates as required, and the build was engineered so those changes don't break anything. We maintain it monthly. Two years in, it's still doing exactly what it was built to do: letting the work do the talking.
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