When this Eastbourne plumber first got a website five years ago, it made sense to go with a local web company offering WordPress hosting and a maintenance package. At the time, having any website was better than nothing. But five years on, the situation had quietly become a problem — and it was costing him money in more ways than one.
The Challenge
The site itself was slow. A 3.2-second load time is well beyond what Google considers acceptable, and well beyond what most visitors will tolerate before clicking back. On mobile — where the majority of emergency plumbing searches happen — it was borderline unusable.
There was also no local SEO to speak of. The site had a homepage and a contact page, and not much else. No service pages, no location pages, no structured data. When someone searched for "plumber Eastbourne" or "emergency plumber Eastbourne", this business wasn't appearing. Competitors with better-optimised sites were taking those jobs instead.
The hosting and maintenance package was costing £80 per month — nearly £1,000 a year. For a site that wasn't generating enquiries, that's a significant ongoing overhead for a sole trader. Whenever something needed changing, it went into a support queue and took days to turn around.
The combination of high cost, poor performance, and zero Google visibility meant the site was genuinely working against the business rather than for it.
The Solution
I rebuilt the site from scratch on the DCS platform. The new design was clean and professional, built to load fast on mobile and to convert visitors into enquiries — clear service descriptions, an easy-to-find phone number, and a simple contact form.
The content architecture was the bigger change. I built out dedicated service pages for each of the core offerings: emergency plumbing, boiler repair and servicing, bathroom installation, leak detection, and drain unblocking. Each page was written to answer the questions a customer actually searches for, and to give Google a clear signal about what the business does.
I then created 15 location pages covering the towns and areas across East Sussex where the business works — Eastbourne, Hailsham, Polegate, Seaford, Lewes, Pevensey, and more. Each page targets the local search terms for that area, links to the relevant services, and includes the business's service area and contact details in a consistent format.
Schema.org LocalBusiness markup was added throughout, and the site was submitted to Google Search Console on launch. The new hosting costs £25 per month — all-inclusive, no separate maintenance contract required.
The Results
The performance improvement was immediate. Site load time dropped from 3.2 seconds to 0.8 seconds — a 75% reduction — which resolved both the mobile usability issues and the performance signals that had been suppressing the site in Google's rankings.
The SEO results followed over the next few months. By month four, the site was ranking on page 1 of Google for "plumber Eastbourne" — the primary search term the business had never appeared for under the old site. Local pack visibility followed, with the business appearing in Google Maps results for plumbing searches across the East Sussex service area.
The monthly cost saving is straightforward: £80 down to £25 is a saving of £660 per year. Over two years, that's more than the cost of the rebuild. The business now controls its own content, updates go live immediately, and there's no support queue to navigate for simple changes.
This project is a good illustration of why an old WordPress site on a managed hosting contract isn't always the safe option it appears. Sometimes the biggest risk is leaving a slow, invisible website in place while competitors pull ahead.