Case studies

What actually changed when we moved these sites.

Three moves off WordPress and Squarespace. Every number below comes from a reading we stored, and every number says how many readings sit behind it. Where a reading went the wrong way, it is in the table anyway.

How to read this

Four things to know before you believe any of it.

Where the scores come from

PageSpeed Insights, Google’s own lab test, scored out of 100 in four categories. We run it against the old site before the move and against the bernard copy after, on mobile and on desktop. It measures how a page is built. It is not the same thing as how fast the site feels on your phone on a train.

Why we count the runs

One PageSpeed reading is close to random. Three readings of one unchanged page, back to back, gave us 43, then 8, then 45. So every figure here states how many readings it rests on and what the spread was. Where we only have a single reading of the old site, we have left the claim off the page rather than dress it up.

Who these owners are to us

None of the three is an arm’s-length paying customer. One sits on a free arrangement in exchange for feedback, one is comped, one is on our own company account, and some of the owners are close to a bernard founder. Each entry says which. An arm’s-length paying customer is the next thing we want, and we do not have one on this page.

Who is named, and who is not

Where an owner has given us permission to be named, the entry carries the name. Where we have not asked, or have not confirmed who speaks for the brand, the entry stays anonymous. Nobody is quoted anywhere on this page, because we have not asked anyone for permission to print their words. The measurements are ours to publish. Their names and their words are not.

01 · WordPress · 339 pages

Holistic Sleep Coaching, off WordPress, with real traffic.

Who they are. Holistic Sleep Coaching, at holisticsleepcoaching.com, trains people to become sleep coaches and sells a professional certification course. The site is both the shop window and the front door to the course. Named here with permission from Emma Dewey, who leads the business.

Where the site came from. WordPress, built with Elementor. 339 pages, and years of them.

What the move did. bernard crawled the site on 13 July 2026, found 339 pages and captured all 339, along with 2,798 images. It has been served by bernard on its own address since 15 July 2026.

Relationship

The account is free, in exchange for feedback, and the owner is a close friend of one of bernard's founders.

This is a site with real visitors, not a test page. It had 832 visitors in the 28 days to 28 July 2026, from our analytics reading on that date. That figure is context, not a result of the move.

The before figures rest on three readings and can never be re-run, because the old site is gone. Treat the before column as indicative and the after column as solid.

Before and after readings, with the basis for each pair
Measure	Before	After	What it rests on
Performance, mobile	44	81	Before: median of 3 readings, range 32 to 54, taken 7 to 13 July 2026. After: median of the last 10 of 99 readings, range 79 to 99, taken 28 to 29 July 2026.
Performance, desktop	71	98	Before: median of 3 readings, range 45 to 74. After: median of the last 10 of 101 readings, range 96 to 99.
Best practices	77	96	Identical on every reading on each side, so this pair is not noise.
SEO checks	92	100	Identical on every reading on each side. A checklist score, not a ranking.
Accessibility, mobile	95	93	Median of the same readings. It went down, not up.

02 · WordPress, Elementor and WooCommerce · 100 pages

A consultancy whose old site is still up, so you can check us.

Who they are. A consultancy that runs organisational and executive assessments and coaching for investor-backed businesses, and sells a manager training programme online.

Where the site came from. WordPress, running Elementor and WooCommerce. 100 pages.

What the move did. bernard crawled the site on 13 July 2026, found 100 pages and captured all 100, along with 162 images. The owner has not switched the domain across yet, so the old site is still the public one and the bernard copy runs on a bernard address alongside it.

Relationship

A comped account. They have not paid for the move.

Because both sides are still live, this is the one comparison on the page that anyone can re-run from scratch. Most before-and-after numbers on the internet cannot be checked. This one can.

We have left mobile performance off the table. We only ever took one reading of the old site on mobile, and one reading is not evidence. The old site is still up, so we can fix that, and we will before anyone quotes a mobile number for it.

Before and after readings, with the basis for each pair
Measure	Before	After	What it rests on
Performance, desktop	66	98	Before: 2 readings, 65 and 66, both 13 July 2026. After: 9 readings, range 97 to 100, median 98.
Best practices	54	100	Identical on every reading on each side.
Accessibility	84	91	Identical on every reading on each side.
SEO checks	85	92	Identical on every reading on each side. A checklist score, not a ranking.
Homepage HTML size	161,562 bytes	18,727 bytes	Measured 29 July 2026, 5 runs per address with caching turned off. The HTML document only, not images or total page weight.
Time to first byte	0.51s	0.065s	Median of the same 5 runs per address. Before: 0.42s to 0.60s. After: 0.057s to 0.195s.

03 · Squarespace · 17 pages, 1,008 images

Fashion Bunny Smith, off Squarespace. Better on phones, flat on desktop.

Who they are. Fashion Bunny Smith, an illustrator who sells prints and cards and runs workshops, at fashionbunnysmith.co.uk. Named here with her permission.

Where the site came from. Squarespace. Only 17 pages, but 1,008 images and about 136 MB of them, which is what a portfolio site actually looks like.

What the move did. bernard crawled the site on 9 July 2026 and captured all 17 pages and 1,008 images. It has been served by bernard on its own address since 21 July 2026.

Relationship

This site sits on bernard's own company account, and the owner is married to one of bernard's founders.

The before figures rest on four readings, which is thin, and the old Squarespace site is gone so they cannot be improved.

Desktop did not get better. Squarespace was already doing a decent job there, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Before and after readings, with the basis for each pair
Measure	Before	After	What it rests on
Performance, mobile	54	78.5	Before: median of 4 readings, which is thin. After: median of the readings taken since the move.
Performance, desktop	85.5	85	No change worth the name. The Squarespace site was already fine on desktop and the move did not improve it.

What we are not claiming

Nothing about rankings. You will not find “we got them to number one” anywhere on this page. We do not yet have before-and-after search data we trust enough to publish, and the SEO score in the tables is a checklist of how a page is built, not a position in Google.
No testimonials. Not because nobody has said anything kind, but because we have not asked anyone for permission to print it.
No claim that your site will do the same. Three moves, from two platforms, none of them arm’s length. That is a small and biased sample and we would rather say so than have you find out later.
No before figures we can no longer check. Where the old site has already come down, the before column can never be re-measured. We have flagged that on every entry it applies to rather than quietly leaning on it.

If you want the longer version of how we think about measuring websites honestly, it lives in The Measure. If you would rather watch the editing than read the numbers, see it work.

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