Case studies

What actually changed when we moved these sites.

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

These studies are not a representative sample. Each visible entry states the owner’s relationship to bernard, including whether the account is paid, comped, or connected to a founder. We would rather make that bias explicit than let a result look more independent than it is.

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. Quotes appear only in the owner’s own words and only where permission is on record. The measurements are ours to publish. Their names and their words are not, unless they say so.

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.

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.

“Everyone keeps telling me to make my site easier to find. I feel like I’m now in the future!”

Tracey, Fashion Illustrator

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.
Quotes are unedited. Every word shown here is printed as its owner said it, with their permission, and only where it is theirs to say. There is no star rating on this page because there are not enough reviews yet to make one honest.
No claim that your site will do the same. The studies shown here are a small and biased sample. 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.

Want to see what yours would look like?

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