Case study · Made You Hungry · premium South Florida catering
Before/After
Both sites were audited on the same laptop, under the same conditions, while both were still live. Every number below is a measurement, and the three that need a caveat get one.
The before column can no longer be reproduced. DNS moved to the rebuild on 29 August 2026, so www.madeyouhungry.com now answers as the “after” column. The WordPress install was routed around rather than torn down and still replies to its old host directly, but nothing points at it: these recordings are the record of what was there.
The short version
Four numbers that carry most of the story. Everything below is the evidence for them.
Performance, phone
52→97
Homepage, Lighthouse mobile. Largest contentful paint fell from 12.5s to 2.7s.
Photos a screen reader can use
0→96
All 209 images on the old site carry an empty alt. Valid markup — and silence to anyone not looking at the screen.
Pages offered to Google
11→34
And three of the old eleven were WordPress leftovers: a sample page, a stale thank-you screen, and a “Hello world!” post.
Pages describing themselves
1/5→5/5
The text under a search result. Blank on four of five old pages; the homepage managed 25 characters.
The engagement
A full rebuild rather than a reskin — the old install stayed up and serving until the day the domain moved, so the business never had a dark hour.
Side by side
Real screenshots of both live sites at 390×844, the width of a phone. Press Scroll both to run them past at a matched speed.
The old homepage stacked 102 photographs under a single heading — and no h1 at all, so nothing on it told a search engine what the page was. The rebuild leads with what the business sells and who it serves.
One page describing four service types, with the menus attached as PDF downloads. It is now seven service pages and eight menus you can read in a browser.
79 photographs, none of them described, loaded at full size. The rebuild serves 46 in modern formats, sized for the device asking.
A seven-field form behind a reCAPTCHA badge that sat on top of it. The replacement walks through occasion, service, logistics, food and contact details, and skips the staffing questions when the order is drop-off.
Recorded, not described
Both sites recorded at 1440×900 and scrolled past at a matched speed — old on the left, new on the right, in one frame so the two sides cannot drift apart. Nothing is sped up. Where the old page runs out of content first, its side holds on the last screen rather than looping back to the top, which would read as a fault in the recording rather than a shorter page.
/ → / · 8.2s/menu-services/ → /catering · 8.17s/gallery/ → /gallery · 8.13s/contact/ → /plan-your-event · 3.53sMeasured, not asserted
Median of 3 runs per page. Mobile uses Lighthouse's own defaults — a mid-tier phone on throttled 4G with a 4× CPU slowdown. Desktop uses Google's shipped preset. Old and new were audited back to back on 28 August 2026; the after column was then re-run on 30 August 2026, once the domain pointed at the rebuild.
| Page | Performance | Accessibility | Best practices | SEO | LCP | Page weight | Requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The front door | 52→97 | 90→100 | 73→100 | 100→100 | 12.5s→2.7s | 1.5 MB→504 KB | 61→39 |
| Menu & Services → Catering | 55→98 | 88→100 | 73→100 | 92→100 | 10.9s→2.4s | 1.1 MB→669 KB | 59→33 |
| The gallery | 56→96 | 88→100 | 73→100 | 92→100 | 12.9s→2.7s | 1.9 MB→754 KB | 81→56 |
| Contact → Plan Your Event | 57→97 | 93→100 | 77→100 | 92→100 | 9.1s→2.5s | 984 KB→311 KB | 47→23 |
| Page | Performance | Accessibility | Best practices | SEO | LCP | Page weight | Requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The front door | 75→100 | 90→100 | 73→100 | 100→100 | 2.7s→604ms | 1.5 MB→606 KB | 65→50 |
| Menu & Services → Catering | 83→100 | 88→100 | 73→100 | 92→100 | 2.0s→638ms | 1.4 MB→761 KB | 59→42 |
| The gallery | 77→100 | 88→100 | 73→100 | 92→100 | 2.7s→646ms | 2.2 MB→922 KB | 93→71 |
| Contact → Plan Your Event | 90→100 | 93→100 | 77→100 | 92→100 | 1.6s→568ms | 1.0 MB→404 KB | 47→33 |
Findability
None of this is visible in a browser, and all of it decides whether a page can be found at all.
| Page | <h1> | Meta description | Described images | Structured data types | Social card tags |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 0→1 | 25 chars→194 chars | 0/102→17/25 | 3→4 | 6→14 |
| Menu & Services | 1→1 | none→163 chars | 0/10→10/10 | 3→7 | 6→14 |
| Gallery | 1→1 | none→135 chars | 0/79→42/46 | 3→4 | 5→14 |
| Contact / Quote | 2→1 | none→176 chars | 0/6→3/3 | 3→4 | 6→14 |
| About | 1→1 | none→190 chars | 0/12→6/6 | 3→4 | 6→14 |
Read this part
Each of these is a place where the obvious reading of the data is wrong. They are here rather than in a footnote because a comparison that hides its own weak points is not worth much.
When this was first captured the rebuild was still answering on a temporary vercel.app hostname, which served robots.txt with Disallow: / — deliberately, so that Google could never index a second copy of the site that somebody would have to redirect away later. Lighthouse reads that block as a failure and marks the whole category down for it, which put the rebuild below the old site on the one score the rebuild was built to win.
The domain moved on 29 August 2026. robots.txt now reads Allow: / and the same audit returns 100 against the old site’s 94. Not a line of the pages changed. It is listed here rather than quietly corrected because it is the one number on this page that was measuring the hosting instead of the site — and that is worth knowing about any score.
All 209 of its photographs carry alt="". An empty alt attribute is valid — it is how you correctly mark an image as decorative — so the automated audit passes it without complaint.
But these are the food photographs the business is selling. To a blind visitor, every one of them is silence. The rebuild describes 96 images and marks 12 genuinely decorative ones as such. No score captures that difference, which is the clearest argument for not stopping at the scores.
Its HTML document is 248 KB against the old site’s 124 KB. Those extra bytes are React’s hydration payload, which arrives inside the same response instead of as separate requests.
What a visitor actually waits on is the total: 1.5 MB across 61 requests before, 504 KB across 39 after. Comparing the HTML documents alone would have told the opposite of the truth.
Found along the way
The old site’s analytics tag is UA-148363647-1 — a Universal Analytics property. Google stopped processing hits to Universal Analytics on 1 July 2023 and shut the interface down the year after. There is no GA4 tag beside it.
So for roughly three years the site has loaded an analytics script on every single visit that records nothing and reports to a property nobody can open. Whatever the traffic has been since mid-2023, it was never captured — which is worth knowing before anyone asks how the new site compares on visitors.
No before column
Not improvements. Additions — there is nothing on the old site to compare them against.
On the old site the menus were 8 PDF links on one page — on a phone, each is a download. They are now HTML pages with prices and dietary marks, at their own URLs. Every old PDF path still resolves.
The old form took a name, an email, a date, a headcount and a message box, behind a reCAPTCHA badge that overlapped it. The new one walks through occasion, service, logistics, food and contact — and drops the staffing questions when the order is drop-off.
Weddings, corporate, drop-off, private chef, grazing tables, floating suppers, event catering. The old site described all of them on one page called “Menu & Services”.
Written against the searches that actually bring catering enquiries — wedding catering cost, service styles, cocktail hour food. The old site’s only post was WordPress’s “Hello world!” stub.
Method
So that anyone can check the half of it that is still checkable, and know exactly what the other half was.
A single Lighthouse run on a laptop is noise as much as measurement. Every figure here comes from the median run by performance score.
On 28 August 2026 old and new were audited back to back per page rather than site by site, so a slow minute on the network hit both equally.
Audited again on 30 August 2026, once the domain pointed at the rebuild, because the SEO category had been scoring the temporary host’s robots.txt rather than the site. The before column is still the 28 August 2026 capture and cannot be repeated — that install only answers by address now.
The old site on Cloudflare, the new one on Vercel. Neither is handicapped by a cold cache or an unwarmed origin.
Screenshots at 390×844 and 1440×900 at 2×, CSS animation frozen, lazy images forced to load first — so neither site is filmed mid-pop-in.
Lighthouse’s own mobile defaults — a mid-tier phone on throttled 4G with a 4× CPU slowdown — and Google’s shipped desktop preset. Nothing was tuned to favour either site.
The after column can be re-measured by anyone, at any time, against the live site. The before column cannot: DNS moved on 29 August 2026, and these recordings are what is left of it.
We run the same audit before we quote anything — the real numbers on your current site, page by page, with no obligation attached to them.