We Rebuilt Our Own Site the Way We Build Yours
Written by Sorin Gavenea, founder of Gavenea Studio
Published: 03/07/2026 · Updated: 09/07/2026
This website performance case study is what happened when we rebranded from Strategy Growth Agency to Gavenea Studio and treated our own site as our hardest client – same standard, same guarantee, same public scorecard.
Here Are the Numbers
Every studio says it cares about performance. Far fewer will show you their own numbers.
Our promise to clients is specific and measurable: PageSpeed 90+, Largest Contentful Paint under 1.5 seconds on mobile, zero layout shift – guaranteed in writing. A promise like that only means something if we hold our own site to it. So when it was time to rebuild under the new brand, we didn’t cut ourselves any slack.
The problem: a slow drift, not a crash
Our old site was never broken. In early June it tested at 1.7 seconds mobile LCP on PageSpeed Insights – already inside Google’s “good” range.
But performance isn’t a one-time score. It drifts. A full-bleed background image in the hero had been quietly inflating with every design tweak, and days before the migration a mobile test came back at 2.5 seconds – the exact line where Google reclassifies a page from “good” to “needs improvement.”
Most people would migrate the site as-is and move on. For a studio that sells milliseconds, 2.5 seconds was unacceptable. So we rebuilt.
Three decisions we’re proud of
We killed the hero background image.
The single biggest LCP offender was the emotional, full-bleed hero image. We replaced it with a text-based hero on a cream background – no heavy image to load, no render delay. The hero went from the slowest part of the page to the fastest. On the rebuilt site, the largest element paints in under half a second.
We standardized on WP Rocket – for everyone.
We bought WP Rocket for a single site first. Within a week we upgraded to the Multi50 license, so every client who takes premium hosting and maintenance gets the same caching, asset optimization, and delivery discipline for the full length of their contract. The tooling we run on our own site is the tooling we run on yours.
We tested a new interaction – and kept the score.
The new site introduces side-entry animated cards, something we hadn’t shipped before. The honest reason we tried it: to see whether motion would cost us anything on the scorecard. It didn’t. The cards animate in, the layout holds, and the numbers didn’t move. Design and speed aren’t a trade-off when the engineering is right.
The migration
The move to Kinsta happened on 26 June 2026 and took roughly 20–30 minutes, with zero downtime. Kinsta’s process makes this low-risk: the site is copied to a temporary domain, verified there, and only then does the DNS switch over. No visitor ever saw a broken page.
The numbers
Here’s the before-and-after, measured on the same tools, in public – the way we ask clients to hold us accountable.
Strategy Growth Agency
Grade: A
Performance: 99%
Structure: 99%
Largest Contentful Paint: 762 ms
Total Blocking Time: 45 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
Fully loaded: –
Gavenea Studio
Grade: A
Performance: 100%
Structure: 100%
Largest Contentful Paint: 494 ms
Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
Fully loaded: 1.0 s
Strategy Growth Agency
Performance: 100
Largest Contentful Paint: 1.7 s
First Contentful Paint: 1.1 s
Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.005
Speed Index: 1.8 s
Gavenea Studio
Performance: 100
Largest Contentful Paint: 1.1 s
First Contentful Paint: 0.9 s
Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.011
Speed Index: 0.9 s
Mobile LCP dropped from a 2.5-second spike to a steady 1.1 seconds. On GTmetrix, the largest element now paints in 494 milliseconds – a 35% improvement over the old site’s best result. Layout shift stayed effectively zero throughout, far under Google’s 0.1 threshold. Total Blocking Time is 0 milliseconds. Every score we guarantee clients, we now pass on our own home page.
What this means if you’re a client
This is exactly the process we run for a B2B SaaS site: diagnose the real bottleneck instead of guessing, remove weight before adding tooling, choose interactions that survive the scorecard, and migrate without downtime. The difference between a site that scores well on launch day and one that stays fast is discipline – and we practice it on ourselves first.
You can verify every number above yourself. Run gaveneastudio.com through PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix right now. If your own site isn’t hitting these numbers, that’s usually a fixable problem – and we’ll tell you exactly where it’s losing time.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
About 20–30 minutes, with zero downtime, on 26 June 2026. The site was copied to a temporary domain, verified, and only then switched over via DNS.
Removing the full-bleed hero background image, which had pushed mobile LCP to 2.5 seconds. A text-based hero on a cream background replaced it, and the largest element now paints in under half a second.
494 ms on GTmetrix (desktop) and 1.1 s on PageSpeed Insights (mobile).
Kinsta hosting, WordPress with Blocksy and Stackable, and WP Rocket for caching and asset optimization.
Every site we build is contracted to hit PageSpeed 90+, Largest Contentful Paint under 1.5 seconds on mobile, and zero layout shift – guaranteed in writing. If we miss the numbers, you don’t pay. The scores in this case study are the same ones we sign our name to for clients.
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