The Griffith Pro Marketing Website Experiment

Follow my journey rebuilding this website from scratch, using WordPress, SEO, performance optimisation, and conversion systems. Not a case study written after the fact. A running log, updated as things actually happen.

Most of what gets written about “growing a website” is either theoretical or reconstructed after the fact, once the messy parts have been smoothed over and the timeline’s been tidied up to look cleaner than it was. I wanted to try the other version: write it as it happens, including the bits that are still unresolved, the settings I haven’t fixed yet, the plugin I haven’t finished configuring, the migration I haven’t done yet.

This page is the spine that holds all of that together. Everything else, the reviews, the diagnostics, the case studies, links back here, and this page links out to all of it.

The three-rung ladder I’m actually standing on

Here’s the part that makes this worth reading rather than just another “my SEO journey” post. I’m not writing about one website. I’ve got three real, currently active sites sitting at three different stages of the exact path this whole site is trying to teach, and I can point to all three at once rather than reconstruct two of them from memory.

Most people writing ladder content like this are guessing at two of the three rungs. I’m not. I’ll be pulling from all three as this page updates, thestrategyreach.com as the honest “you might not need more than this” example, earlychildhoodedu.net as the real before/after of outgrowing a builder, and this site as the live, in-progress top rung.

Chapter one: how this actually started

I bought my first domain back in 2020 with genuinely no idea what came next. I cancelled three separate domains between 2020 and 2022, one because I didn’t understand that a domain and hosting are two different things, one because I got stuck obsessing over design instead of publishing anything, one because I never landed on a clear enough reason for the site to exist. I’ve written the full, slightly embarrassing version of that story in why I ended up on Hostinger in the first place, if you want the beginner-era detail.

The short version: Hostinger stuck around across all four of my current domains because the dashboard never made me feel stupid while I was figuring things out, and the pricing was straightforward enough that I could stop overthinking and just start building. That’s not a small thing when you’re the person who’s already cancelled three domains out of pure confusion.

What I haven’t mentioned yet on this page directly: griffithpromarketing.com isn’t actually my first serious attempt either. There was a site before this one, digitalpromarketing, running for over a year before I moved it from a builder to WordPress myself, broke it in the process, and then neglected it for another twelve months rather than fixing it. I’ve told that whole story properly, mess included, in More Than A Year, One Ruined Site, And Why I Started Again From Scratch. Griffithpromarketing.com is the actual clean restart that came out of that, WordPress through Hostinger from day one this time, no conversion, no year of neglect.

Since it’s a genuine restart rather than a continuation, the early numbers are exactly that, early. Here’s what the first 24 hours and first 28 days actually looked like in Search Console, not smoothed over or waited out until they looked better.

Chapter two: what’s actually true about this site’s performance right now

This is the chapter I’m proudest of, mostly because it’s honest in a way a lot of hosting content isn’t. I went into performance testing expecting to find a slow server. I tested properly, six separate readings, both mobile and desktop, and found the opposite: TTFB sitting at a rock-solid 190 milliseconds every single time, well under the point where it would even register as a problem.

The real bottleneck turned out to be Element Render Delay, the gap between the server responding and the browser actually painting the page, and I traced that down to render-blocking CSS, my own stylesheet files, not some external script. The full breakdown, real numbers, real screenshots, is in My TTFB Was Fine, My Site Was Still Slow.

I still haven’t finished fixing it. I know roughly which WP Rocket settings need checking, Remove Unused CSS, Combine CSS Files, possibly critical CSS generation, but I’m working through them one at a time with a fresh test after each change, rather than flipping every switch at once and hoping nothing breaks. That post will get updated with real before-and-after numbers once it’s actually done, not a summary of what I expect to happen.

Chapter three: migrating anyway, and why

Here’s the part that took me a while to get comfortable saying plainly: I’m still migrating this site to Cloudways, even though my current hosting isn’t actually the problem. Not as a rescue story, because the data doesn’t support that, but for scalability and traffic-spike headroom, real reasons that just aren’t about today’s numbers. I laid out the full honest reasoning, and what Cloudways actually offers, in the Cloudways review.

As of this update, the migration itself hasn’t happened yet. I’m still in the Hostinger affiliate approval window, and I’ve deliberately held off publishing anything that relies on unconfirmed referral tracking until that clears. Once the actual migration happens, I’ll capture proper before-and-after numbers using the same multi-run methodology, and that becomes the real case study this page has been building toward.

Chapter four: building the actual diagnostic system

Alongside the hosting side of things, I’ve been building out the site’s whole diagnostic backbone. The 21-point website checklist is the free, public entry point now, genuinely interactive, tick boxes that save your progress and a score that updates as you go, rather than a static PDF nobody finishes reading.

I’ve also gone back through some of the site’s older comparison content and fixed it up properly rather than leaving it as-is, the Rank Math vs Yoast vs AIOSEO piece and the WP Rocket vs free plugins comparison both needed real fixes, broken links, inconsistent styling, and in one case a table of contents that silently redirected to the homepage instead of scrolling down the page. Small stuff, but the kind of small stuff that quietly costs a site credibility if it never gets caught.

Where things actually stand right now

Why I’m doing this in public

The honest answer is that a real, ongoing, occasionally unfinished story is a better trust signal than a polished one. Anyone can write “here’s how I fixed my slow website” after the fact and leave out the part where they were wrong about the cause for two weeks first. This page doesn’t get that luxury, since it’s being updated as things actually happen, which means the mistakes and the dead ends stay visible instead of getting edited out.

If you’re at any of the three stages on that ladder up top, still on a builder, just moved to WordPress, or wondering whether your hosting is actually the problem, I’d rather you see the real version of how that plays out than a tidied-up summary. Check back here as the chapters update, or follow the individual posts as they go live.

Dewi