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Learn how we took a Premium Tax AdvisoryWebsite from Good to Outstanding Pinnacle Marketing took over the website maintenance and hosting for a Tax Advisory business.   Their homepage went from a mobile Performance score of 83 to 98, cutting the time for the main content to appear from 4.1s to 2.1s. At a glance Performance score: 83 → 98 (+15 points) Largest Contentful Paint: 4.1s → 2.1s (49% faster, from Google’s “poor” band to “good”) Speed Index: 4.4s → 2.8s (36% faster) Layout stability: held near zero (CLS 0.002), so nothing jumps as the page loads Best Practices: held at 100 The client and the challenge The client is a boutique tax practice offering bespoke UK and US tax advice and compliance to private clients. Its site has a premium look: a dark, full-screen hero with a large gold geometric graphic behind the headline. That hero was also the problem. On a mobile test, the page started drawing quickly (1.5s) but the hero took 4.1 seconds to finish loading. Google rates anything over 4 seconds as “poor” for Largest Contentful Paint, one of the three Core Web Vitals it uses as a ranking signal. For a high-value advisory firm, first impressions count. Prospective clients often arrive on mobile from a search or referral, and a slow, half-loaded hero undermines the premium positioning the design was built to convey. SiteSpeed before SiteSpeed after What we did We kept the design exactly as the client loved it and worked on how it is delivered, in five areas. Hosting migration. Moved the site onto Pinnacle-managed hosting, with faster servers and an up-to-date PHP version, so pages start responding sooner. Image optimisation. Converted the hero graphic and other images to modern formats (WebP/AVIF), resized them for each screen size, and preloaded the hero so the browser fetches it first. Caching and CDN. Enabled page and browser caching and served assets through a content delivery network, so returning visitors and distant users load from a nearby copy. CSS and JavaScript clean-up. Minified files, removed unused CSS, and deferred non-essential scripts so they no longer block the page from drawing. Fonts. Self-hosted and preloaded the web fonts to remove third-party lookups before text can appear. Results The slowest metric, Largest Contentful Paint, halved and moved from “poor” to “good”, lifting the Performance score into the green. Metric (Lighthouse, mobile) Before After Change Google rating after Performance score 83 98 +15 points Good (90–100) Largest Contentful Paint 4.1s 2.1s 49% faster Good (≤ 2.5s) Speed Index 4.4s 2.8s 36% faster Good (≤ 3.4s) First Contentful Paint 1.5s 1.6s Unchanged (normal test variance) Good (≤ 1.8s) Total Blocking Time 70ms 90ms Unchanged (normal test variance) Good (≤ 200ms) Cumulative Layout Shift 0 0.002 Stable Good (≤ 0.1) Every metric now sits in Google’s green band. Scores come from Google Lighthouse mobile tests run before and after the work. The metrics explained The biggest gains came where visitors notice most: how fast the main content appears and how quickly the page looks complete. Lighthouse tests on a simulated mid-range phone over a slow 4G connection, so these are conservative, real-world mobile figures. Here is what each metric means and what changed. Performance score: 83 → 98 This is Google’s overall speed grade, out of 100, built from the five metrics below. Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time and Cumulative Layout Shift carry the most weight. Moving from 83 (amber) to 98 (green) puts the site among the fastest on the web for mobile. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 4.1s → 2.1s LCP measures when the biggest thing on screen finishes loading. On this site that is the gold hero graphic and headline. It is one of Google’s three Core Web Vitals, and anything over 4 seconds is rated “poor”. This was the main problem, and the biggest win. Optimising and preloading the hero image, plus the faster hosting, halved the wait. The site now loads with 0.4s to spare against Google’s 2.5s “good” limit. Speed Index: 4.4s → 2.8s Speed Index measures how quickly the visible page fills in, frame by frame. A low score means the page looks complete early rather than piecing itself together. Caching, the CDN and deferring non-essential scripts cut it by 1.6 seconds, moving it from amber to green. First Contentful Paint (FCP): 1.5s → 1.6s FCP is the moment the first text or image appears, so visitors know the page is working. It was already good and stays well inside Google’s 1.8s limit. The 0.1s difference is normal run-to-run variation. Total Blocking Time (TBT): 70ms → 90ms TBT measures how long scripts lock up the page so it cannot respond to taps or scrolling. Both results are far below Google’s 200ms limit, so the page responds instantly to visitors. The small difference is within normal test variation. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0 → 0.002 CLS measures how much content jumps around while the page loads, the cause of mis-taps on buttons. It is a Core Web Vital, and anything under 0.1 is good. At 0.002 the page is effectively rock steady, even with new image formats and fonts in place. Why it matters A faster site protects both rankings and enquiries, without changing a pixel of the design. Search visibility. Core Web Vitals feed into Google’s ranking systems, so passing all three removes a handicap against competing firms. First impressions. The premium hero now appears in about two seconds on mobile, so the brand looks the way it was designed to from the first glance. Fewer lost visitors. Every extra second of loading raises the chance a mobile visitor gives up before seeing the services or contact buttons. Faster, simpler support. With the site now on Pinnacle-managed hosting, one team looks after the server and the website. There is no third-party host to chase, so issues are diagnosed and fixed faster. Is your website holding you back? Pinnacle Marketing offers a free SEO audit and speed check: we run your site through

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