Verde Garden Services

This one started from an unusual position: the old site was working. Verde had spent years on Wix building real Google visibility, with front-page positions for the searches that matter locally and a steady flow of enquiries off the back of them. Nobody was asking me to fix a traffic problem.

The first real problem was ownership. The site, the domain settings, the DNS and the booking system all lived inside a Wix subscription. Stop paying and the business disappears from the internet. That is not a website you own, it is a website you rent.

The second was that it looked its age. A template stretched to fit eight services, no proper before-and-after gallery for a trade that lives on before-and-afters, a booking calendar with nothing bookable in it, and reviews pasted in by hand.

So the brief was to modernise and get them off Wix, while treating the SEO as untouchable. A rebuild that loses the rankings is not a modernisation, it is a setback with a nicer typeface.

Two jobs running in parallel: build the new site properly, and move house without dropping anything.

A new site, built from scratch

• Custom-coded in Next.js and Tailwind, hosted on Vercel. No page builder, no theme, no monthly platform fee.
• A palette taken from the Verde logo: deep forest green, a brighter grass green for accents, and warm off-white so white cards still read as cards.
• Eight service pages, up from six, written in the client's own words so each one reads like them rather than like a copywriter.
• A real before-and-after gallery, where every job is one photo shown whole rather than cropped to fit a grid. The crop throws away half the story, which is the whole point of the picture.
• The blog carried across word for word, all four posts and the category page Google had already indexed.
• WhatsApp and click-to-call on every page, because most of this audience is on a phone in a garden.

Three ways to get an enquiry in

• A chat widget that is really a form. It opens like a conversation and asks one thing at a time, then emails the answers through. Nobody is typing back and the replies say so.
• A full enquiry form that takes photos. Up to ten pictures attached to the email, so Verde can price a garden without driving to it first.
• The Jobber quote form, kept on the contact page exactly where it was, so the client's existing job management workflow carried over untouched.

Reviews that update themselves

The old reviews were typed in by hand, so they were out of date the moment anyone left a new one. The new site reads the Google Business Profile live and refreshes daily, with Google left as the source of truth for its own numbers.

Verde had 71 reviews in total, but only 36 of them sat on the Google profile. The other 35 had been left on the Wix site and would have vanished with it, so I pulled them out before it came down and folded them in alongside the live ones. The rating on the site now reflects every review the business has actually earned.

Keeping the Google rankings

Before writing a line of the new site, I crawled the old one and listed every address Google could see, all 27 of them, along with the titles, descriptions and structured data on each.

• 19 pages kept their exact address. Same web address, new site.
• 8 were redirected permanently, only where Wix had auto-generated a duplicate page or the client had renamed a service. No chains, no dead ends.
• The structured data and the sitemap stayed put, at the same address Google already knew, so the Search Console history carries on instead of starting again.
• Titles were left alone through launch. Change the site and the wording at the same moment and you cannot tell which one moved the rankings. Improving them is a job for once things have settled.
• Then I tested it. All 27 old addresses were checked against the new site: 19 loaded directly, 8 redirected once, none failed.

Moving the domain without going offline

Migrations rarely break the website. What they break is the email. Verde run Google Workspace on their domain, and everything routing that mail was sitting in Wix's settings alongside the site, so the switch was staged carefully.

• Search Console ownership was secured first, because the old verification was a Wix one that stops working the moment you leave Wix.
• The new setup was built and checked before it went anywhere near live traffic, with the old one recorded in full as a rollback plan.
• Email was moved across in advance, not after. It kept working throughout, and it is better protected now than it was on Wix.
• Both sites stayed live during the changeover, so whichever one a visitor reached, they got a working website.
• The domain itself never changed, only who hosts it, which is exactly the outcome you want.

The client got a written report at the end: what moved, what was checked, and what to expect over the fortnight afterwards.