Insights
Notes from the studio
Practical thinking on brand, web, and marketing - and where it is all heading.
Same website.
A fraction of the code.
We moved 1110ths.org off WordPress to a static site. Same design, 14 requests instead of 39, and the image fix that came after it.
Read the article →On October 2 I moved 1110ths.org, the site for Eleven Tenths, off WordPress. If you visit it today you won’t notice a thing. Underneath, it’s a very different page.
The site had been running on a WordPress plan with Elementor and a stack of plugins. When I looked at who actually used any of it, the answer was me. I’m the only person who edits the site, and the one custom plugin we’d set up for tracking contacts had been opened by exactly one person: also me.
WordPress is fine. What I couldn’t justify was paying for, updating and loading a whole content system that nobody needed.
Your site is fast on your laptop.
Your customers are on their phones.
A WordPress site scoring 42 on mobile, and the measured steps that took it to 94. Same design, same content, just faster.
Read the article →You check your website the way most owners do: on a laptop, on good wifi, where it loads fine. Then a customer opens it on a three-year-old phone with two bars, and it takes several seconds to show up.
A good share of them are gone before your homepage finishes. Google is watching that too, and it quietly ranks slow sites lower.
I ran into exactly this recently on a WordPress site built in Elementor. On a phone it scored 42 out of 100 for speed. On a laptop it looked great, which is precisely why it had gone unnoticed. The fast version is the only one most owners ever see.
Your customers are asking AI, not Google.
Here’s what that means for your website.
Half of U.S. adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, and AI Overviews have cut clicks to top results by 58%. Here’s what the shift to AI search means for your website.
Read the article →A few years ago, if someone needed a local business, they probably opened Google and started clicking through search results. Now, a lot of people start somewhere else.
Instead of scrolling through ten blue links, they get one answer. Sometimes it includes sources. Sometimes it recommends specific businesses. Sometimes it doesn’t.
I’ve started seeing this show up on client sites over the past year, and I think it’s one of the biggest changes to online marketing since smartphones became how most people browse the web.