Nature's Call Landscaping
Case StudyA premium, hand-built 20-page website for a 22-year hardscape and drainage specialist in Wilmington, Delaware. A cinematic hero video, a lead pipeline built to qualify the right projects, and a full migration off WordPress. No CMS, no page builder, no bloat. This was Phase 1: the digital foundation.
Visit NaturesCallLandscaping.com
Results at a Glance
Google PageSpeed Insights
The previous WordPress site, weighed down by uncompressed video and full-size images, scored in the 30s on mobile PageSpeed. The rebuild lifted that to 99 on desktop and 80 on mobile, with perfect 100s for Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO on both. Same content, dramatically better delivery.
About that mobile Performance score
Mobile Performance comes in at 80, and that number is a deliberate choice. The single largest element on the page is the full-width hero video from the client's drone cinematographer. For a premium hardscape brand, that cinematic first impression is the entire argument, so the video was kept full-width and uncropped rather than shrunk to chase a higher score.
Every other signal is effectively perfect: 100 for Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO on both mobile and desktop, 99 on desktop Performance, 0 ms Total Blocking Time, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of essentially zero (0.001 desktop, 0 mobile). Everything that could be optimized without compromising the brand was optimized completely. The one number that didn't max out is the one we chose not to chase.
The Bottom Line
What all of this means for the business, in plain terms:
- A website that loads fast and looks like the high-end work it sells.
- Every page built with both site visitors and search and AI discovery in mind.
- Leads that arrive pre-qualified, with budget and location up front.
- A lead form built to refine where inquiries come from and to measure future advertising.
- New photos get branded and sized automatically, with no need for a second watermarked set from the photographer.
Project Overview
Nature's Call Landscaping has been building high-end hardscapes in the Wilmington, Delaware area for 22 years, with 125+ Google reviews at 4.8 stars and a business that runs largely on repeat clients and referrals. The reputation was strong, and the site had been refreshed not long before. What held it back was technical. Large, uncompressed images and video made it slow to load, and many images were missing the alt text that search engines and screen readers rely on. The craftsmanship was there. The site just was not showing it off or getting found for it.
This was not a lead-volume problem. It was a lead-quality and positioning problem. The goal of the rebuild was to make the site look and perform like the premium specialist Nature's Call already is, lead with the work, and help the right inquiries stand out. One genuine differentiator drove much of the content: Nature's Call treats drainage and storm water as central, not an afterthought, which matters in a region of clay soil and freeze-thaw cycles where drainage problems are common.
Phase 1 delivered the digital foundation: a complete custom website design and rebuild, a migration off GoDaddy and WordPress onto Cloudflare, the qualified-lead pipeline, analytics, and the full technical SEO and AI-visibility groundwork. It is built to grow, with later phases scoped separately.
Site Architecture
20 pages, hand-built in Eleventy with Nunjucks templating, organized around how a high-end homeowner researches a contractor:
The drainage page is a standout. The old site had no dedicated drainage page yet still drew real search demand for it. The new one turns a genuine differentiator into a page that can rank and convert.
Migration off WordPress
Moving a 22-year-old site means protecting two decades of accumulated search equity. The old site had a real problem hiding in plain sight, and the migration was the chance to fix it.
Zero-Downtime Cutover
The entire new site was built and approved on a private test environment before a single DNS record changed. Hosting moved off GoDaddy onto Cloudflare Pages: faster, more secure, automatic SSL, and no more monthly hosting fees. The client's email was left exactly as it was, so nothing on the business side broke during the switch.
Consolidating a Split Canonical
A Google Search Console audit of the old site revealed the homepage was indexed twice, once on http://www and once on https:// non-www, splitting its ranking signals across two hosts. The new site forces a single canonical and redirects every variant to it, so 22 years of authority finally points at one URL instead of being divided.
301 Redirect Map
The old WordPress URLs (city landing pages, project posts, service pages) were mapped one by one to their new homes through a 40-rule redirect file, with the highest-impression pages prioritized. Old links from across the web, and the rankings attached to them, carry straight through to the new structure instead of dead-ending in 404s.
Cinematic Hero Video Pipeline
The client works with a professional drone cinematographer. Most contractors waste that footage by uploading a heavy, compressed clip that loads slowly and looks grainy. The hero here is engineered to deliver the cinematic feel without the weight.
The hero is kept full-width and uncropped on purpose. Cinematic, full-bleed video is a luxury convention. Cropping it to force everything above the fold is a lower-tier instinct that a premium audience reads instantly.
Build-Time Photo Watermarking
The client's photographer delivers clean, unwatermarked originals. The brand wants its wordmark on every public photo. Doing that by hand across hundreds of images, at every responsive size, would be untenable. So it runs automatically at build time.
Composited Before Resizing
A Sharp image pipeline composites the Nature's Call wordmark onto each full-resolution photo before it is resized, so the mark scales proportionally and stays crisp across every responsive variant. A skip list excludes photos that already carry a baked-in logo, so nothing gets double-branded.
Content-Hash Caching
Watermarking and resizing hundreds of images is expensive. Each image is keyed by a hash of its bytes plus the watermark settings, so a build only regenerates the photos that actually changed. A cold build takes minutes; a typical content update finishes in seconds.
Why It Matters to the Client
The owner can drop a new unwatermarked photo into the project folder and the site handles the branding, the sizing, and the modern formats on its own. No design tool, no two sets of files, no waiting on the developer for routine photo swaps.
Qualified-Lead Pipeline
The goal was qualified leads, not just more of them. The contact form is built to surface the details that matter on a high-end project up front, so the right conversations are easy to spot.
The notification email is itself designed. It reads as a clean, color-coded brief (who, where, budget, timeline, source, message) rather than a wall of raw form fields, so the office can act on a lead in seconds. The whole pipeline runs serverless with no monthly platform fee.
SEO Strategy
The content was not guessed. A full Google Search Console audit of the old site mapped where real demand existed but no clicks were landing, and the new site was written to capture exactly those clusters without keyword stuffing.
Demand-Driven Content
The audit surfaced strong, near-zero-click demand around drainage, “outdoor living,” Hockessin and Greenville, and Pennsylvania paver patios. Each cluster was mapped to the one page that should own it: services own their head terms, and the real project pages carry the location long-tail naturally, because a genuine Hockessin or Garnet Valley project is the most honest way to rank for those towns.
The anti-stuffing rule was strict. Each town and service concept appears where it is actually true, on a real project or the real service page, with FAQ blocks as the natural home for the “near me” and “{town}” phrasings.
Technical SEO
Structured Data
JSON-LD across the site: LocalBusiness with full NAP, geo, hours, and price range; WebSite; per-page Service schema; and auto-generated BreadcrumbList on every inner page.
Per-Page Meta & OG
Every page enforces a title, description, and Open Graph tags through a frontmatter contract, with a generated default share card and per-page overrides.
Canonical & Sitemap
Self-referencing canonical on every page, an auto-generated XML sitemap with priority tiers, and a robots.txt that excludes only the payment and thank-you pages.
Clean URL Structure
Semantic, hyphenated paths under /services/ and /our-work/, replacing the old WordPress permalink sprawl.
NAP Consistency
Name, address, and phone are identical across the footer, the structured data, and the Google Business Profile, reconfigured to target the right service area.
Cache-Busted Assets
CSS and JS are fingerprinted on every build so visitors never get stale files after an update.
In plain terms: the site is built to show up when someone nearby searches for the work, and to be the result they click.
Performance Optimization
Every optimization decision was deliberate. Not just checking boxes, but understanding the tradeoffs behind each technique, including the one that intentionally costs a few mobile points.
Accessibility
A perfect 100 Accessibility score on both mobile and desktop, built on real semantic fundamentals rather than an overlay widget:
Security
A full set of security response headers ships on every route, with the content security policy rolled out carefully:
HSTS
Strict-Transport-Security enforces HTTPS on repeat visits, closing the door on protocol-downgrade attacks.
X-Frame-Options: DENY
Blocks the site from being embedded in an iframe, defending against clickjacking.
X-Content-Type-Options
nosniff prevents MIME-type sniffing attacks.
Referrer & Permissions Policy
Referrer is limited to strict-origin-when-cross-origin, and camera, microphone, geolocation, and topics APIs are disabled.
Staged CSP
The content security policy launched in report-only mode so a mistuned rule could never break the form or analytics during cutover, with a clear path to enforcing once verified.
Server-Verified Turnstile
The contact form validates its Cloudflare Turnstile token server-side, so spam protection cannot be bypassed by a forged client request.
In plain terms: the site is locked down so it cannot be hijacked, framed inside a scam page, or used to push spam through the contact form.
AI Discoverability
Built to be understood and cited by AI search tools as readily as by Google:
In plain terms: when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI for a contractor like this, the site gives a clear, accurate answer to point to.
Analytics & Conversion Tracking
The site uses Umami, a privacy-friendly analytics tool that needs no cookie banner. Phone and email clicks are tagged as custom events, so the owner can see not just how many people visit, but how many actually reach out and how. Combined with the lead form's attribution capture, it lays the groundwork to measure future ad spend against real inquiries.
Technology Stack
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| Site Generator | Eleventy (11ty) with Nunjucks templating |
| Hosting | Cloudflare Pages (migrated off GoDaddy) |
| Images | eleventy-img + Sharp, WebP/JPEG, build-time watermarking |
| Hero Video | Adaptive H.264 / HEVC, 1080p / 720p, fast-start encoded |
| Fonts | Self-hosted WOFF2 (Cormorant Garamond, Jost) |
| Forms | Cloudflare Pages Function + Resend |
| Spam Protection | Cloudflare Turnstile (server-verified) |
| Analytics | Umami (privacy-friendly) |
| Structured Data | JSON-LD (LocalBusiness, Service, BreadcrumbList) + llms.txt |
| Testing | Node test suite (forms, email, headers) |
A Reputation Worth Showing Off
The reputation was already there. The job of the new site was to finally communicate it, and to make sure the next homeowner researching a premium contractor in Wilmington sees it clearly.
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I'm a Wilmington, Delaware web developer who builds fast, custom websites for local businesses. Whether you need a brand-new custom website design or a website redesign like this one, every project is designed around your goals and built to attract the right customers.